Sometimes, in the midst of a real crap-load kind of winter day, people (usually stupid ones) will ask me, "Ryan, why do you hate winter so much, the snow is so pretty?" I usually just look at them blankly for a long moment before hysterically explaining that: " Well, Basically for 4 months out of the year I have shitty hair because if I don't wear a hat I will probably literally die. I have to wear coats which no matter how you slice it, make me look fat. Don't get me wrong, my coats are cute, but they do make me look fat. So for 4 months out of 12, I feel fat and unattractive! I get depressed, everything hurts, my penis shrinks and I can't go outside for more than 15 minutes (tops) before hypothermia begins to set in and snow melts into my socks." Also, without fail, once a year, I will nearly get frostbite and or freeze to death.
Last year, when I was in denial of winter's arrival, I decided that I would ride my scooter to my 6:00a.m.work meeting while the weather was just reaching a toasty 28 degrees. I didn't want to break out the winter coats just yet, so I wore a much more slimming sweatshirt instead. Somewhere around twenty minutes into my scoot to work I realized my hands were frozen around the handle bars, that I was blacking out and that I hadn't stopped grinding my teeth since I started my moped. Also I should mention I was having trouble blinking because the wind was freezing my eye balls. My red Honda Metropolitan scooter topped out at 36 miles per hour, so for forty minutes I crawled through empty dark streets at 5:30am. Freezing to death.
When I got to work I played it cool and waved at my coworkers on the way to the bathroom, where I ran hot water over my hands. It was so painful I actually couldn't cry. I wanted to, I thought if I cried it would distract me from my pain, but it was such an acute pain my brain couldn't do anything other than feel that pain. Not even cry. I admitted it was winter after that, and pouted the rest of the day knowing I'd have to wear a coat for four months and live confined indoors, like a prisoner.
The year before that the same thing happened on a February morning, except replace the scooter with my legs. The sun was out, so naturally I thought it was a hundred degrees outside. I set out in my fall jacket for a brisk walk to a coffee shop two miles away. Oh and I didn't wear socks because the sun was out and I wanted to feel sunny air hit my feet through the holes of my slippers. I remember wondering why I was stiff as a board and why my fingers were blue when I glanced at a UMB bank time and date billboard and then reading that the temperature was 14 degrees.
This year I'm fighting off winter as hard as I ever have. When I tell people I just moved to Chicago, the first thing they say is, "so this is your first Chicago winter?"
"Yeah," I say.
"Ohhhhh," is a choice response, followed by cynical laughter and walking away without finishing the sentence. It's the sort of "ohhhhhh," someone says when a friend reveals they have gone back to their abusive ex. "I know he loves me and he only hit me that once, plus I'm pregnant and we're going to keep it." "Ohhhhhhh," they might say in response while thinking what an idiot the other person is. I'm not exaggerating when I say this exact conversation happens every time it is mentioned that I am new to Chicago. At first I brushed it off, but after probably the hundredth person to walk away laughing, I started getting scared.
I don't know if I'm cut out for Chicago winters. I'm beginning to wonder if Chicago is even where I needed to move to, "find myself." I hate to admit it, because of how horrifically cliche it sounds, but if you take away all my other reasons, "I'm moving for art, I'm moving to get a fresh start," or, "I'm moving to Chicago for love," the only real reason; the only true reason I moved is because I don't know who I am or where I belong and I thought the city would start my heart again. So far Chicago has started my heart. It has started it in ways that make me feel everything all at once, in a way that makes me realize how blank and def and stoned my heart has been for the bulk and most recent corners of my life.
I've been looking for signs from the universe, for an affermation that I made the right decision coming here. For a while my daily affermation has been the orginal Banksey art work spray painted on the side of a crappy burger joint in the West Loop. The artwork depicts the baby from the Untouchables plummiting down the Odessa Stairs while Capone's henchmen shoot eachother. I remember walking past that piece of art six months ago, and knowing somehow, that I would soon be living a block away from it. But now the ass holes at the crappy burger joint have covered up the Banksey in an effort to make their crappy burger slum look more like every other crappy slum building surrounding it.
Along with being an encouraging piece of art, the Banksey was also my compas. I knew when I looked at it I was facing East, or as I like to call it, "Eat." I've always had trouble with directions and have thus hated people who give them using North, East, South or West as a refference point to where I should be heading. "All you gotta do is go North on Belmount and then go West on Main street and then take a sharp East when you see a tree with a pair of rollerskates tied around it and then my house is the one facing due North." When people talk to me like this, all I can do from telling them what an ass hole they sound like, is to laugh and say, "I don't know what the fuck your talking about." What ever happend to the good ol fashioned series of left and right directions. I like those directions.
When I was young, my ugly friend Spohia taught me a neat trick that I still use today...like everyday. "I always remember North, East, South and West by saying, 'Never Eat Soggy Waffles'. Since 'Never' is the first word of the sentence it goes on top, and then you just make a cross with your figers," she said to me after I told her she was stupid for thinking the sun sets in the West, becuase it deffinatley set in the South. I've been wrong before though. So now, every single time I need to figure out where I am I physically have to point my fingers infront of me and say, "Never Eat Soggy Waffles."
I've been trying to explore more areas using the never eat soggy waffles navigation system, but I've had mono for the past few weeks so I havn't gotten a chance to really explore the city as much as I'd like to. I actually havn't had a chance to do much of anything other than sleep and explode diareah out of my ass two to three times a day. People keep asking me where I got mono, "oh my gosh, well how'd you get it, have you been making out with a lot of people?" I usually tell them I don't know.
I'd like to say that I don't actually know where I got mono, but I'm pretty sure the gangbang I attended earlyer in the year might have had something to do with it. Of coarse I've only told a few people this, as I'm finally learning when it's appropriate to filter my thoughts, but I can't help but think what an intrusive question it is in the first place. "Where did you get mono?" I feel like with such a probing question I should give people the truth. "I got mono from a sex party I went to a few months ago, in the basement of a dollar store." I don't care if it offends people, the truth often does. I think people need to be more aware of the questions they ask and the answeres they may recieve, and any part I can have in helping people reach that awareness fills me with joy.
I gave Kevin and his roomate Popkee mono too. I feel really bad about it, but I've never had more fun being deathly ill in my life. The first time I had mono I was bed written for a month while I watched my dip shit boyfriend play Kingdom Hearts on the Playstation and smoke a lot of pot. It was awful. Kevin, Popkee and myself have been lying around their apartment being sick and watching movies and eating terrible food on a make shift twenty foot couch. We've been sleeping so much I'm getting bed soars. Mono makes me so tired I litterally fell asleep the other morning while I was tying my shoe laces to go to work. I wasn't late though, don't worry.
I started feeling better though a few days ago and decided to celibrate by throwing on a scarf and walking through the Loop in search of a store with enough pizzaz to possess a Christmas gift worthy of Jen Harris. I almost frooze to death during my half hour search for the Brown Line train to Kimball. I finally called my friend Johnathan for directions. "Go North to Lake and then go East, you'll see the Brown Line entrance a few blocks down Lake." I pulled my frozen hands out of my pockets and held my frozen pointer infront of me and while making a cross said, "never eat soggy waffles."
And then I wasn't lost anymore.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Whoah Nelly
I've been living in Chicago for a little over a week now and my feet consequently appear to have been fried in a deep fryer after running a few laps on a trail made of cheese graters. Someone of no zoological merit once told me that a horse stands for most of it's life, they may only lie down for a couple hours a day. I feel like a horse. I wake up and walk down a flight of 5 stairs, to walk half a mile to a bus which takes me to a different place to get out and walk. The rest of my day is usually spent walking or standing, and if I'm lucky I might be leaning against something. I would say, on any given work day, that I stand about 11 hours. The two days I have off a week are spent sitting on a couch with as much mobility as a drunk corpse. But my legs look fucking amazing so I guess there's that.
People here are good walkers. Even the old ones. Today I was walking in the Loop engulfing the city with my eyes when I heard a gumph from the man walking behind me. I looked back and met eyes with a man who was no younger than a hundred and two, who then peels out and practically blows my scarf off as he bulleted past me. I should also mention that the oldest man in the universe that passed me at warp-speed, he did so while texting on an i-Phone. In Kansas, by the time most people hit 60 they are to fat and and lazy to walk while they grocery shop, so they ride the grocers scooters around the store before dropping them off in front off at the register and walking out. In Kansas people don't walk fast, in fact I don't even think they walk, it's more of a combination of moseying and letting laws of inertia propel your body long enough to get inside your car. Here in Chicago that shit doesn't fly. Old people here could probably legitimately beat me up if I picked a fight with one.
I've been here a little over a week and am in complete culture shock. People are the same no matter where you go but depending on where you go people do things differently. For instance, people from Chicago undress quickly. I noticed this first through my intimacy with Kevin. He'll be shaking his underwear off his ankle around the same time my hair is raised by my shirt brushing up and over my head. I think it's because people here have so much shit with them at all times because most people don't have a car. Picture what a normal person would take in a car with them and then take the car away and replace them with two legs. I wear a shirt under a long sleeve shirt under a hoodie under a coat; my accessories include a scarf, a backpack filled with everything I can think of that I might possibly need.
Last week, I put three books in my bag in case I had trouble deciding what book I should read later that day. I hate reading, I read probably two books a year and ONLY if they keep my interest with graphically described sex scenes and a heavy hand of humor. So instead of reading I just lugged three books with me all day thinking, "when would I even have a chance to read, why in the fuck am I carrying these, does this backpack make me walk gayer?" It takes a long time to de-robe when you have that much shit on your person at all times. That's another thing I spend a lot of time doing, undressing and dressing. I spend about 10 minutes a day getting ready for the cold and about 10 minutes figuring out if I need gloves or not, and about 15 minutes taking off my clothes to adjust to climate controlled heating. That is over one half of an hour every day I'm putting on or taking off clothes. Which is why people like Kevin can go from winter wonderland apparel to naked and sexy in a blink of an eye. I'm getting faster though, so I guess there's that.
I'm living with 6 other people in this art collective space called NoSandbox. It's next door to Harpo studios so I've been telling people in Kansas that I live by Oprah. We didn't have art collectives in Kansas and if we did who fucking cares because Chicago has way more of them. Things are uncertain at the collective, the lease ends in 5 months and one of the leaseholders is leaving in a month. We all share a common sleeping area with sheets and boards holding up the sheets as room dividers, but I don't mind because I can see the Sears Tower from my sheet-room's window. Everything is disgusting, the floors look like a vollyball court, the bathrooms have so much bacteria visibly growing in them that I'm almost wondering if they should be seriously quarantined and bulldozed, but I don't mind so much. I'm usually to busy looking at how high the ceilings are to notice things like, what might be poop smeared on the hallway floor.
I miss my Jen, I miss my family and I miss my old apartment but I've been to busy to be depressed about those things. I'm not in a position in my life where I can acknowledge negativity in the way I have previously and seemingly sought it out in the past. It's easy to slip and let life pass you but I got my fucking elbow pads on I wont be down long. So I guess there's that.
I've also been dealing with a pesky emotion for about three months now that sort of makes me want to puke. I was first punched in the face by this emotion's coiled fist a month ago when I was visiting Kevin and meeting my new roomates before I moved in. Kevin and I were invited to a party at NoSandbox which was foretold to have a burlesque show, areal acrobatics, ice cream and local beer. We sat at the bus stop which would take us to the party and to my future home and I couldn't stop tearing up with anxiety. My life was about to change, I was afraid my roommates would hate me, and I was fighting off kevins glances and affections. I think doctors would call my tears a result of a massive panic attack. Kevin took me in his arms and sang to me a song never sung, "who is this man in my arms? Who is this beautiful man in my arms? It's Ryan, it's Ryan, it's Ryan. As he started getting louder I ran away from him and the bus stop while he chased me singing, "It's Ryan, it's Ryan." I looked behind me thinking he was further away but he was right there, right in front of me. He kissed me, and that's when I got punched in the face.
Two night ago I roasted a chicken with Kevin. There was one point when I was putting diced onions that he had just cut, on the breasts of the chicken. Our eyes met and our smiles matched. I got punched in the face then too.
I'm falling in love. So I guess there's that.
People here are good walkers. Even the old ones. Today I was walking in the Loop engulfing the city with my eyes when I heard a gumph from the man walking behind me. I looked back and met eyes with a man who was no younger than a hundred and two, who then peels out and practically blows my scarf off as he bulleted past me. I should also mention that the oldest man in the universe that passed me at warp-speed, he did so while texting on an i-Phone. In Kansas, by the time most people hit 60 they are to fat and and lazy to walk while they grocery shop, so they ride the grocers scooters around the store before dropping them off in front off at the register and walking out. In Kansas people don't walk fast, in fact I don't even think they walk, it's more of a combination of moseying and letting laws of inertia propel your body long enough to get inside your car. Here in Chicago that shit doesn't fly. Old people here could probably legitimately beat me up if I picked a fight with one.
I've been here a little over a week and am in complete culture shock. People are the same no matter where you go but depending on where you go people do things differently. For instance, people from Chicago undress quickly. I noticed this first through my intimacy with Kevin. He'll be shaking his underwear off his ankle around the same time my hair is raised by my shirt brushing up and over my head. I think it's because people here have so much shit with them at all times because most people don't have a car. Picture what a normal person would take in a car with them and then take the car away and replace them with two legs. I wear a shirt under a long sleeve shirt under a hoodie under a coat; my accessories include a scarf, a backpack filled with everything I can think of that I might possibly need.
Last week, I put three books in my bag in case I had trouble deciding what book I should read later that day. I hate reading, I read probably two books a year and ONLY if they keep my interest with graphically described sex scenes and a heavy hand of humor. So instead of reading I just lugged three books with me all day thinking, "when would I even have a chance to read, why in the fuck am I carrying these, does this backpack make me walk gayer?" It takes a long time to de-robe when you have that much shit on your person at all times. That's another thing I spend a lot of time doing, undressing and dressing. I spend about 10 minutes a day getting ready for the cold and about 10 minutes figuring out if I need gloves or not, and about 15 minutes taking off my clothes to adjust to climate controlled heating. That is over one half of an hour every day I'm putting on or taking off clothes. Which is why people like Kevin can go from winter wonderland apparel to naked and sexy in a blink of an eye. I'm getting faster though, so I guess there's that.
I'm living with 6 other people in this art collective space called NoSandbox. It's next door to Harpo studios so I've been telling people in Kansas that I live by Oprah. We didn't have art collectives in Kansas and if we did who fucking cares because Chicago has way more of them. Things are uncertain at the collective, the lease ends in 5 months and one of the leaseholders is leaving in a month. We all share a common sleeping area with sheets and boards holding up the sheets as room dividers, but I don't mind because I can see the Sears Tower from my sheet-room's window. Everything is disgusting, the floors look like a vollyball court, the bathrooms have so much bacteria visibly growing in them that I'm almost wondering if they should be seriously quarantined and bulldozed, but I don't mind so much. I'm usually to busy looking at how high the ceilings are to notice things like, what might be poop smeared on the hallway floor.
I miss my Jen, I miss my family and I miss my old apartment but I've been to busy to be depressed about those things. I'm not in a position in my life where I can acknowledge negativity in the way I have previously and seemingly sought it out in the past. It's easy to slip and let life pass you but I got my fucking elbow pads on I wont be down long. So I guess there's that.
I've also been dealing with a pesky emotion for about three months now that sort of makes me want to puke. I was first punched in the face by this emotion's coiled fist a month ago when I was visiting Kevin and meeting my new roomates before I moved in. Kevin and I were invited to a party at NoSandbox which was foretold to have a burlesque show, areal acrobatics, ice cream and local beer. We sat at the bus stop which would take us to the party and to my future home and I couldn't stop tearing up with anxiety. My life was about to change, I was afraid my roommates would hate me, and I was fighting off kevins glances and affections. I think doctors would call my tears a result of a massive panic attack. Kevin took me in his arms and sang to me a song never sung, "who is this man in my arms? Who is this beautiful man in my arms? It's Ryan, it's Ryan, it's Ryan. As he started getting louder I ran away from him and the bus stop while he chased me singing, "It's Ryan, it's Ryan." I looked behind me thinking he was further away but he was right there, right in front of me. He kissed me, and that's when I got punched in the face.
Two night ago I roasted a chicken with Kevin. There was one point when I was putting diced onions that he had just cut, on the breasts of the chicken. Our eyes met and our smiles matched. I got punched in the face then too.
I'm falling in love. So I guess there's that.
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Jonny Appleseed
Jen and I were smoking in her bed talking about tampon applicators and famous people. She asked if I was related to anyone famous. Usually people ask me if I'm related to Star Trek star, Walter Koenig, to which I usually say, "yeah, he used to take me to the T.V. sets and watch him practice his lines." I don't know what's better, the fact that people believe me or the fact that I actually kind of look like Walter Koenig, but people are amazed to find out my fake relation to him. They don't don't ask questions either, as if the thought that there may be more than one person with the last name Koenig never crossed their mind. But I can't lie to Jen, so I told her the truth, "I'm related to Johnny Appleseed."
"Johnny Appleseed isn't a real person Ryan, are you related to the Easter Bunny too?"
"What the hell? He is to a real person, I'll call my mom and prove it to you."
"Your mom is about as credible as you are I wont believe her anyway." It didn't matter, I called my mom and put her on speaker so Jen could hear.
"Mom, Jen doesn't believe me, but we're related to Johnny Appleseed right?"
"Yeah, we're related to Daniel Boon too."
"Shit I forgot about that, we are related to Daniel Boon."
Jen was laughing so hard nothing was coming out, she didn't believe myself or my mom, and made it quite clear she thought we were both crazy, "you are so goddamn stupid."
It really bothered me that Jen didn't believe me, I mean for Christ sake I did a power point of my family tree in middle school and put Johnny Appleseed on it, of coarse he's a real person. I decided to investigate via google search and it turns out my entire life is a lie. Jen got under my mom's skin too apparently because about an hour later I got a call from my mom, "So, I called Grandma and she looked in the Boon Book, and we are actually related to him, she said Johnny Appleseed isn't a real person, but we are related to a famous stripper," she said confounded.
"Boon Book? Famous stripper? Are you serious?" I asked, choking back laughter.
"Yeah, I remember Uncle David telling me when I was a little girl that I was related to Johnny Appleseed and I guess I just always believed him. Then again, David once told everyone he was related to Sara Vaughn until he realized she was black. Sally Rand was very famous burlesque dancer who made the feather dance explode, and your related to her."
It's all making sense, all these years I've believed I was related to a man who spread the joy of apples across the continent, when I'm actually related to a stripper and some guy that wears dead animals on his head. That sounds more like my bloodline to me. I googled pictures of Sally Rand, and my God is she beautiful, one picture in particular jumped at me and I could see how her blood is in me. The caption said, "Burlesque queen with her famous ostrich feather fans," she held the fans in front of her naked behind them. I googled Daniel Boon, found out his name is actually spelled Boone, and that the only thing I like about him is the fact that Fess Parker played him in a Boone television series and I would deffinatly sit on Fess Parker's face. Not now though, he's dead I think, but definitely the Fess Parker on the box set cover.
I've never worn a dead animal on my head before but being related to a burlesque dance reminds me that I too have taken my clothes off for money. My dear departed family member, Sally Rand probably rolled over in her grave as I destroyed the art of stripping on a rusty pole in a trashy gay bar at age 18. I'd always wanted to strip since I was a kid and stayed up watching a gangster movie that seemed to be shot entirely in a strip club. I used to strip out of my basketball shorts and loose tee-shirt in front of my full length mirror as a kid. I remember stripping to the Tony Braxton album when I was 12, and wanting to be on a stage when I was older. It wasn't a serious aspiration of mine but it was something my mind wondered to often. Turns out, when I finally got the chance to strip, that it's a lot less glamorous than the gangster movies made it out to be. There wasn't a lot of money, wasn't a soft curtain that raised for my entrance, or a slow sensual song to move to, come to think of it, the only thing that went as I thought it would was the free drinks that were bought for me afterward.
I had a fake ID that I bought from my doppelganger who was coincidentally also named Ryan. I frequented a gay bar called Missy B's because it was a place where I could get sloshed for free and complemented even when I wore crappy flip flops and beer stained shirts. One night I quit my job at Kohl's because in the same day I was told I had to clean up human fecal matter and blood out of the fitting rooms, human excrement is the tipping point for me so I walked out on my shift and right into Missy B's where I ordered a glass of vodka and a glass of water. Somewhere between my glass of vodka and the four shots of whiskey, I found myself venting about my unemployment to a really hot guy who could give two shits about my situation, in fact I was probably just talking in his direction as he ignored me and watched the dancers. He must have been listening somewhat because he finally decided to talk to me he said, "you don't have a job right? Well I bet you would make some money up there," he pointed at the poles.
Next thing I know I'm hanging upside from the rafters naked, getting dollars shoved into my underwear which, I swear to god, had pee stains very obviously plastered on the front. After the song was over, Hung up by Madonna, I stumbled into the bathroom and counted $48 bucks, and dropped one of the dollars in the toilet. Picking it out with my finger tips I decided it would be the tip for my next drink.
I wish I could say that was the last time I was nearly naked in that bar, but just this year I was pulled on stage by an obese drag queen and given the choice to jump on a mini tramp for five minutes naked and get a free drink, or sit back down and buy my own drinks. The choice was simple, and as I flew through the air I saw the crowd from a new perspective. People were laughing, having a good time, and throwing money at me. There was a moment while I was doing an impressive split in the air that I saw someone taking a picture of me, and for a second I was ashamed. That feeling went away about as quickly as my free drink. The way I see it, I had fun, people had fun with me, and I got 16 bucks for jumping on a trampoline with the coordination of a blind baby cow. It's not the Sally Rand show anymore. It's the Ryan Koenig show, and I don't have ostrich flower fans.
I have mini trampolines and rusty poles.
"Johnny Appleseed isn't a real person Ryan, are you related to the Easter Bunny too?"
"What the hell? He is to a real person, I'll call my mom and prove it to you."
"Your mom is about as credible as you are I wont believe her anyway." It didn't matter, I called my mom and put her on speaker so Jen could hear.
"Mom, Jen doesn't believe me, but we're related to Johnny Appleseed right?"
"Yeah, we're related to Daniel Boon too."
"Shit I forgot about that, we are related to Daniel Boon."
Jen was laughing so hard nothing was coming out, she didn't believe myself or my mom, and made it quite clear she thought we were both crazy, "you are so goddamn stupid."
It really bothered me that Jen didn't believe me, I mean for Christ sake I did a power point of my family tree in middle school and put Johnny Appleseed on it, of coarse he's a real person. I decided to investigate via google search and it turns out my entire life is a lie. Jen got under my mom's skin too apparently because about an hour later I got a call from my mom, "So, I called Grandma and she looked in the Boon Book, and we are actually related to him, she said Johnny Appleseed isn't a real person, but we are related to a famous stripper," she said confounded.
"Boon Book? Famous stripper? Are you serious?" I asked, choking back laughter.
"Yeah, I remember Uncle David telling me when I was a little girl that I was related to Johnny Appleseed and I guess I just always believed him. Then again, David once told everyone he was related to Sara Vaughn until he realized she was black. Sally Rand was very famous burlesque dancer who made the feather dance explode, and your related to her."
It's all making sense, all these years I've believed I was related to a man who spread the joy of apples across the continent, when I'm actually related to a stripper and some guy that wears dead animals on his head. That sounds more like my bloodline to me. I googled pictures of Sally Rand, and my God is she beautiful, one picture in particular jumped at me and I could see how her blood is in me. The caption said, "Burlesque queen with her famous ostrich feather fans," she held the fans in front of her naked behind them. I googled Daniel Boon, found out his name is actually spelled Boone, and that the only thing I like about him is the fact that Fess Parker played him in a Boone television series and I would deffinatly sit on Fess Parker's face. Not now though, he's dead I think, but definitely the Fess Parker on the box set cover.
I've never worn a dead animal on my head before but being related to a burlesque dance reminds me that I too have taken my clothes off for money. My dear departed family member, Sally Rand probably rolled over in her grave as I destroyed the art of stripping on a rusty pole in a trashy gay bar at age 18. I'd always wanted to strip since I was a kid and stayed up watching a gangster movie that seemed to be shot entirely in a strip club. I used to strip out of my basketball shorts and loose tee-shirt in front of my full length mirror as a kid. I remember stripping to the Tony Braxton album when I was 12, and wanting to be on a stage when I was older. It wasn't a serious aspiration of mine but it was something my mind wondered to often. Turns out, when I finally got the chance to strip, that it's a lot less glamorous than the gangster movies made it out to be. There wasn't a lot of money, wasn't a soft curtain that raised for my entrance, or a slow sensual song to move to, come to think of it, the only thing that went as I thought it would was the free drinks that were bought for me afterward.
I had a fake ID that I bought from my doppelganger who was coincidentally also named Ryan. I frequented a gay bar called Missy B's because it was a place where I could get sloshed for free and complemented even when I wore crappy flip flops and beer stained shirts. One night I quit my job at Kohl's because in the same day I was told I had to clean up human fecal matter and blood out of the fitting rooms, human excrement is the tipping point for me so I walked out on my shift and right into Missy B's where I ordered a glass of vodka and a glass of water. Somewhere between my glass of vodka and the four shots of whiskey, I found myself venting about my unemployment to a really hot guy who could give two shits about my situation, in fact I was probably just talking in his direction as he ignored me and watched the dancers. He must have been listening somewhat because he finally decided to talk to me he said, "you don't have a job right? Well I bet you would make some money up there," he pointed at the poles.
Next thing I know I'm hanging upside from the rafters naked, getting dollars shoved into my underwear which, I swear to god, had pee stains very obviously plastered on the front. After the song was over, Hung up by Madonna, I stumbled into the bathroom and counted $48 bucks, and dropped one of the dollars in the toilet. Picking it out with my finger tips I decided it would be the tip for my next drink.
I wish I could say that was the last time I was nearly naked in that bar, but just this year I was pulled on stage by an obese drag queen and given the choice to jump on a mini tramp for five minutes naked and get a free drink, or sit back down and buy my own drinks. The choice was simple, and as I flew through the air I saw the crowd from a new perspective. People were laughing, having a good time, and throwing money at me. There was a moment while I was doing an impressive split in the air that I saw someone taking a picture of me, and for a second I was ashamed. That feeling went away about as quickly as my free drink. The way I see it, I had fun, people had fun with me, and I got 16 bucks for jumping on a trampoline with the coordination of a blind baby cow. It's not the Sally Rand show anymore. It's the Ryan Koenig show, and I don't have ostrich flower fans.
I have mini trampolines and rusty poles.
Sober
I was talking to a coworker yesterday who just finished the Master Cleanse, which basically means she drank lemon juice for 10 days and lost a bunch of weight. I've always thought of the Master Cleanse as a gateway cleanse to eating disorders, as it requires you to not eat for over a week. Where was this cleanse when I was passing out in gym class because all I was consuming for weeks was juice and slivers of apples? It would have been easier to just say, "Back off, it's called the Juice Cleanse and it's a really healthy way to loose weight." Instead I was stuck identifying with the ugly word, anorexia.
But I need to get my body back in balance, and the Master Cleanse sounded like a really good idea until I learned that I can't drink or smoke for an entire ten days. As this information was stabbed into my ears by my co-worker who is so thin she looks like a walking back scratcher, it dawned on me that I can't for the life of me remember the last time I spent an entire ten days sober. I think I was actually 17 and that was 5 years ago. I don't drink daily nor do I smoke pot daily, but for five years I have not gone 10 days without doing one or the other, and that is startling news to me. For now I'll chalk it up to it being my early twenties, and not my inclination towards a chemical rush and confusing it as mental clarity.
Last night I was talking with Jen over the passing of a pipe loaded with plush green herbs, explaining to her that I'm really going to try and do the Master Cleanse. Jen just laughed and said, "Have you met you? Every bottle of booze I've bought since we moved in together has vanished within a day or two, I'm not optimistic about this cleanse Ryan."
"Yeah, well I've had a really rough year," I said handing her the pipe and holding by breath. As I ex-hailed, I let my body fall backwards onto her bed, pulled my feet behind my ears and cannon balled a fart towards Jen. "That is the only mental Clarity I need," I said laughing until tears fell. Maybe Jen's right, I thought to myself, I have met me. For now, I'm going to have a glass or two, maybe a bottle, of wine every other night and not feel bad about it. It takes a true friend to talk you out of a cleanse and sobriety at the same time. I'm going to miss her and I am going to lean on her harder than I ever have, and she will lean on me, because soon were going to fall on our ass's when we move to separate sides of the continent.
I've been sleeping with Jen for about a month now. In a totally platonic, I'm gay and she's a roller derby dyke, sort of way. This morning I woke her up be screaming her name, and then pestered her for two hours while she got ready for the day. I think she takes longer when I annoy the shit out of her but it's so much fun. "Eat shit and die bitch," I might yell while sprinting past the bathroom to throw a wadded up old sock at her face. I can't imagine what our neighbors must think when they hear her scream at me and call me a a dried up bag of diseased dicks, but I know she really means I love you, you beautiful man you. And when I call her a smelly vat of putrid vagina's, I really mean, I love you and there are literally no words in the world to adequately tell you how much.
But I need to get my body back in balance, and the Master Cleanse sounded like a really good idea until I learned that I can't drink or smoke for an entire ten days. As this information was stabbed into my ears by my co-worker who is so thin she looks like a walking back scratcher, it dawned on me that I can't for the life of me remember the last time I spent an entire ten days sober. I think I was actually 17 and that was 5 years ago. I don't drink daily nor do I smoke pot daily, but for five years I have not gone 10 days without doing one or the other, and that is startling news to me. For now I'll chalk it up to it being my early twenties, and not my inclination towards a chemical rush and confusing it as mental clarity.
Last night I was talking with Jen over the passing of a pipe loaded with plush green herbs, explaining to her that I'm really going to try and do the Master Cleanse. Jen just laughed and said, "Have you met you? Every bottle of booze I've bought since we moved in together has vanished within a day or two, I'm not optimistic about this cleanse Ryan."
"Yeah, well I've had a really rough year," I said handing her the pipe and holding by breath. As I ex-hailed, I let my body fall backwards onto her bed, pulled my feet behind my ears and cannon balled a fart towards Jen. "That is the only mental Clarity I need," I said laughing until tears fell. Maybe Jen's right, I thought to myself, I have met me. For now, I'm going to have a glass or two, maybe a bottle, of wine every other night and not feel bad about it. It takes a true friend to talk you out of a cleanse and sobriety at the same time. I'm going to miss her and I am going to lean on her harder than I ever have, and she will lean on me, because soon were going to fall on our ass's when we move to separate sides of the continent.
I've been sleeping with Jen for about a month now. In a totally platonic, I'm gay and she's a roller derby dyke, sort of way. This morning I woke her up be screaming her name, and then pestered her for two hours while she got ready for the day. I think she takes longer when I annoy the shit out of her but it's so much fun. "Eat shit and die bitch," I might yell while sprinting past the bathroom to throw a wadded up old sock at her face. I can't imagine what our neighbors must think when they hear her scream at me and call me a a dried up bag of diseased dicks, but I know she really means I love you, you beautiful man you. And when I call her a smelly vat of putrid vagina's, I really mean, I love you and there are literally no words in the world to adequately tell you how much.
Monday, August 22, 2011
adsfasdfasdf
After dumping the entire contents of my pepper shaker into my dollar store pasta I decided to skip dinner and drink instead. Since Jen and I moved in almost a year ago, I have managed to break every single piece of stem and glassware owned by both of us. I usually break them when washing them by hand, and have actually shattered a glass bear mug in my hands on several occasions. I just really hate dishes and I drink when I do them, a combination that bestows Herculean strength into my grip. As a result, tonight I am having a glass of wine in a coffee mug covered in kittens.
Jen is out with some new girl she met in her french class, and I am watching romantic comedies and kung fu by myself with a bottle of wine and a kitten coffee cup. I can't seem to get off of my couch the past few weeks. I catch myself daydreaming about lying on my couch while I'm at work, or really anywhere other than my couch, at least ten times a day. I stole my couch from my dad's house because I remember lying in that couch when I was in middle school and feeling my troubles melt away with it's dark blue tethered pleather exterior. Oddly enough, my inclination to seeking comfort in quality furniture is a perfect example of how I am becoming my mother.
When I moved in with Jen I begged my mother for the love seat she was hoarding in her basement. The love seat is large enough to accommodate a full grown cow comfortably and is probably the most most magnificent chair ever created. The chair's name is "Either Allen" because it has a potent either that will calm you to a sleep of unimaginable deepness. "Mom, please I need a chair for my new living room and you're not even using it, it's just collecting dust," I pleaded to my mom, whose response was, "I've gone through a lot in that chair, it's my divorce chair.
I drink my drinks out of coffee cups, because i've broken all of my wine glasses and generally all of my glasswear that doesn't have a handle attached to it. I watched romatic comedies for about seven hours and then realized I hate being single. It reminds me of the time when I was little nd my dog died and I watched homeward bound a thousand times . I tend to do that. Watch sad stories about what I'm sad about wright about that.
Jen is out with some new girl she met in her french class, and I am watching romantic comedies and kung fu by myself with a bottle of wine and a kitten coffee cup. I can't seem to get off of my couch the past few weeks. I catch myself daydreaming about lying on my couch while I'm at work, or really anywhere other than my couch, at least ten times a day. I stole my couch from my dad's house because I remember lying in that couch when I was in middle school and feeling my troubles melt away with it's dark blue tethered pleather exterior. Oddly enough, my inclination to seeking comfort in quality furniture is a perfect example of how I am becoming my mother.
When I moved in with Jen I begged my mother for the love seat she was hoarding in her basement. The love seat is large enough to accommodate a full grown cow comfortably and is probably the most most magnificent chair ever created. The chair's name is "Either Allen" because it has a potent either that will calm you to a sleep of unimaginable deepness. "Mom, please I need a chair for my new living room and you're not even using it, it's just collecting dust," I pleaded to my mom, whose response was, "I've gone through a lot in that chair, it's my divorce chair.
I drink my drinks out of coffee cups, because i've broken all of my wine glasses and generally all of my glasswear that doesn't have a handle attached to it. I watched romatic comedies for about seven hours and then realized I hate being single. It reminds me of the time when I was little nd my dog died and I watched homeward bound a thousand times . I tend to do that. Watch sad stories about what I'm sad about wright about that.
Friday, August 12, 2011
WOP
My mother is convinced she is going to get murdered in my neighborhood, so she's made it a point to never visit me, saying, "I get neuvous driving in your neighborhood, I don't know where anything is and if I got lost I could get murdered." Inspite of her paralysing fear of Kansas City, Mo, my mom managed to make it to my apartment today, to steal the tires off of my car. Over the years I've watched my mom do some pretty cheep shit, but I think stealing my tires before the salvage yard tow-truck could get my car, and switching them out with her old tires might be her grandest heist yet. "They've got thousands of miles left Ryan, I'm not letting a salvage yard take those tires, when mine are bald."
At 7:00am she calls me to alert me that she is in rout with her boyfriend, and that I need to unlock the trunk. "Mom, Jesus Christ just reach in one of the broken windows and hit the trunk button," I slurred into the phone. Shortly after I said this I hear my car alarm going off. Apparently throwing boulders through the windshield and drivers side windows will not activate the alarm, but popping the trunk when the doors are locked will. So I had to get out of bed, which when you take into consideration how much I drank last night, was a challenge akin to climbing Everest. HEAT! the heat was on when you got back becuase you turned it off or so you thought becuase jen leaves the ac on with the wondows open and you hate that. talk about how you went crazy infront of clint how you were naked infront of clint and then talk about how this is just a normal day for you.
At 7:00am she calls me to alert me that she is in rout with her boyfriend, and that I need to unlock the trunk. "Mom, Jesus Christ just reach in one of the broken windows and hit the trunk button," I slurred into the phone. Shortly after I said this I hear my car alarm going off. Apparently throwing boulders through the windshield and drivers side windows will not activate the alarm, but popping the trunk when the doors are locked will. So I had to get out of bed, which when you take into consideration how much I drank last night, was a challenge akin to climbing Everest. HEAT! the heat was on when you got back becuase you turned it off or so you thought becuase jen leaves the ac on with the wondows open and you hate that. talk about how you went crazy infront of clint how you were naked infront of clint and then talk about how this is just a normal day for you.
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
If I stay there will be double.
Somewhere between getting my nipples naired as a form of fore-play by a twenty year old hunk and swimming at a beach surrounded by sky scrappers, I came to the conclusion that Chicago was the city for me. I also came to the conclusion that people don't know what fore-play is any more. It has the word play in it, so play. Shave some nipples or backs, take it from me; it's kinda hot. Prior to getting my nipples shaved by a stranger in Chicago the only true form of fore-play I'd had was the time Cow and I played dirty scrabble in the nude, turns out there are only so many dirty words you can spell with four E's and three vowels. Fore-play has a new importance in my life now, which means yet another tally has been added in the, "things my future husband must be good at" list. In fact, it might be wedged between, "has good job," and "cries during Finding Nemo." People tell me I'm unrealistic in my expectations of a man who posses a great deal of masculinity coupled with an inclination to get teary eyed during heart wrenching Disney dialogues. But I think it's totally realistic, and I know it's realistic because I've seen it.
I went to Chicago last week with my friend Jered on a mission. I was to find a job, and Jered was to leave for Korea to reunite with his husband Michael. I like to think of my friends in terms of what animal I think they most resemble. Jered is a manatee, hands down; and not because he is fat and gets ran over by boats but because he just floats with the currant life guides him with, and because life has left scars on him so deep not even a boat could cut. He has never lost his grace though, and he is floating to Korea to be with the man he loves, who left two months ago for a job teaching English to children. Michael is more of a long haired chihuahua, and not because he has bladder control issues and shakes a lot, but because his energy is so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that you can't help but love him. Plus he sort of looks like a Chihuahua.
Somehow my manatee and chuihuahua friends work as one, and it gives me hope that maybe I'll find someone to float across the world and into my arms. But for now, I need to float my ass to Chicago and be absolutely alone, because lets face it, I'm lazy. I'm never going to accomplish anything in Kansas City where I have become lazy, unmotivated, and way to attractive to live here. Seriously I'm probably a Kansas City 8.5 but in Chicago I'm bumped down to a C-6 (Chicago 6). Jerrod and I walked probably a collective one hundred million miles in our four days together in Chicago and not one of those miles were walked alone; people were everywhere, and a staggering amount of them were mouth watering.
As we walked through Chicago I stared up at the buildings, as I have done many times before in that city, but I saw something different this time. I knew that the buildings I was looking at were going to be my north stars, my way of getting home after work, and that soon I would be telling people I live under them. I took frequent breaks to nudge Jered when a C-7 or a C-9 walked by, and we would freeze just long enough to absorb their beauty. Being surrounded by beauty is one thing, but being surrounded by beauty and hot ass men is another, which is why within 12 hours of being in Chicago I was getting my nipples shaved by Jailbate. Jailbate was cute, and optimistic about life and love. It was nice to find someone so pure in Chicago, I mean the guy has a rock collection. People that collect stuff in their adult lives are either cereal killers or just really unwilling to let the things they love go with the pressures of being a grownup.
I usually try and take something from each person I sleep with, not a strand of hair or anything creepy like that, but a lesson or a sentence. It's my own sort of collection. Jailbate gave me this, "you're going to love this city. It's crazy and hectic, but it's in order. Everyone is walking around but they all have a place to go, they all have somewhere to be." Jailbate's right. It wasn't until I got back to Kansas City that I realized how right he was. People here in KC are hectic, and there are people everywhere, but there is no order and people don't really have somewhere to be.
Cow called a few times when I was sleeping with Jailbate, I ignored his calls, rolling over as his ring tone filled the air from my pants pockets. I knew something was wrong, his calls signify a chapter in my life that I want to close forever, and under no circumstance will I open a book I've closed. Cow though, is intent on re-opening the book of mismatched chaos that was our relationship, and has finally succeeded by tossing a boulder through my windshield and drivers side window. I came home two days ago to a car with a blown head gasket and a boulder on my drivers seat. The need to get out of here doubles with every glance I get at my car. The need to leave Kansas City grows each day.
Cow has agreed to pay for the damages, and in the mean time I'm stuck driving my fathers crappy Yukon. This car is so big, the steering wheel is thicker than my wrists, which makes me look like a midget when I drive it. I am grateful though for my father and him lending me his vehicle. He called tonight to ask for the Yukon, because he needs to take my step mother to work tomorrow. On my way to his house to drop it off, the Yukon started to run out of gas.
I pulled off the highway at the next exit and coasted into a gas station, where I was greeted with two pick up trucks backed into eachother and about five men dressed in camouflage overalls. I was dressed in daisy dukes and a skin tight v-neck. I was almost certain that I would be lynched. As I quickly pumped gas into the gas hungry monster, the men begin to scream at a woman. One man hits her, sending her to the ground. Her child started to cry and I started to panic. The woman ran towards me and said, "I need gas money, I need to get out of here." She said this between gasps of tears. I watch as her toddler is physically thrown into the truck, screaming for help, and I watched the fear grow in her eyes grow. I gave her two dollars and jumped in the Yukon for safety.
"I need to get out of here too lady," I thought to myself as I sped away.
I went to Chicago last week with my friend Jered on a mission. I was to find a job, and Jered was to leave for Korea to reunite with his husband Michael. I like to think of my friends in terms of what animal I think they most resemble. Jered is a manatee, hands down; and not because he is fat and gets ran over by boats but because he just floats with the currant life guides him with, and because life has left scars on him so deep not even a boat could cut. He has never lost his grace though, and he is floating to Korea to be with the man he loves, who left two months ago for a job teaching English to children. Michael is more of a long haired chihuahua, and not because he has bladder control issues and shakes a lot, but because his energy is so overwhelmingly enthusiastic that you can't help but love him. Plus he sort of looks like a Chihuahua.
Somehow my manatee and chuihuahua friends work as one, and it gives me hope that maybe I'll find someone to float across the world and into my arms. But for now, I need to float my ass to Chicago and be absolutely alone, because lets face it, I'm lazy. I'm never going to accomplish anything in Kansas City where I have become lazy, unmotivated, and way to attractive to live here. Seriously I'm probably a Kansas City 8.5 but in Chicago I'm bumped down to a C-6 (Chicago 6). Jerrod and I walked probably a collective one hundred million miles in our four days together in Chicago and not one of those miles were walked alone; people were everywhere, and a staggering amount of them were mouth watering.
As we walked through Chicago I stared up at the buildings, as I have done many times before in that city, but I saw something different this time. I knew that the buildings I was looking at were going to be my north stars, my way of getting home after work, and that soon I would be telling people I live under them. I took frequent breaks to nudge Jered when a C-7 or a C-9 walked by, and we would freeze just long enough to absorb their beauty. Being surrounded by beauty is one thing, but being surrounded by beauty and hot ass men is another, which is why within 12 hours of being in Chicago I was getting my nipples shaved by Jailbate. Jailbate was cute, and optimistic about life and love. It was nice to find someone so pure in Chicago, I mean the guy has a rock collection. People that collect stuff in their adult lives are either cereal killers or just really unwilling to let the things they love go with the pressures of being a grownup.
I usually try and take something from each person I sleep with, not a strand of hair or anything creepy like that, but a lesson or a sentence. It's my own sort of collection. Jailbate gave me this, "you're going to love this city. It's crazy and hectic, but it's in order. Everyone is walking around but they all have a place to go, they all have somewhere to be." Jailbate's right. It wasn't until I got back to Kansas City that I realized how right he was. People here in KC are hectic, and there are people everywhere, but there is no order and people don't really have somewhere to be.
Cow called a few times when I was sleeping with Jailbate, I ignored his calls, rolling over as his ring tone filled the air from my pants pockets. I knew something was wrong, his calls signify a chapter in my life that I want to close forever, and under no circumstance will I open a book I've closed. Cow though, is intent on re-opening the book of mismatched chaos that was our relationship, and has finally succeeded by tossing a boulder through my windshield and drivers side window. I came home two days ago to a car with a blown head gasket and a boulder on my drivers seat. The need to get out of here doubles with every glance I get at my car. The need to leave Kansas City grows each day.
Cow has agreed to pay for the damages, and in the mean time I'm stuck driving my fathers crappy Yukon. This car is so big, the steering wheel is thicker than my wrists, which makes me look like a midget when I drive it. I am grateful though for my father and him lending me his vehicle. He called tonight to ask for the Yukon, because he needs to take my step mother to work tomorrow. On my way to his house to drop it off, the Yukon started to run out of gas.
I pulled off the highway at the next exit and coasted into a gas station, where I was greeted with two pick up trucks backed into eachother and about five men dressed in camouflage overalls. I was dressed in daisy dukes and a skin tight v-neck. I was almost certain that I would be lynched. As I quickly pumped gas into the gas hungry monster, the men begin to scream at a woman. One man hits her, sending her to the ground. Her child started to cry and I started to panic. The woman ran towards me and said, "I need gas money, I need to get out of here." She said this between gasps of tears. I watch as her toddler is physically thrown into the truck, screaming for help, and I watched the fear grow in her eyes grow. I gave her two dollars and jumped in the Yukon for safety.
"I need to get out of here too lady," I thought to myself as I sped away.
Friday, July 29, 2011
Beehave
I stepped on a bumble bee on a beach when I was about 11, and the bee punished me by dislodging his ass into my flesh. Literally, dislocated the bottom half of itself and injected it into the thin layers of skin between my heel and toes. My mom, grabbed her purse and for a moment I thought she was going to pull out an emergency bee sting kit. Instead she pulled out a Discover card and began to dig at the dip of my foot like someone using a spatula to scrape off stubborn burnt crust off of a pan. At least, along with the screaming, that is how I remember it. She was probably gentle and kind, in fact I recall her face wincing with pain when I would jolt as she touched the wound, 'this is going to hurt, but it'll all be over soon," she said. I remember watching my skin bend with the indention of the credit card and watching the pulsating sack of bee intestine pump poison into my blood stream. I gained a respect for bees that day, but mostly I learned to scream and run whaling my arms when I see one.
On more than one occasion I have ran my car off of the road because a bee was on my dashboard, sometimes it's not even a bee but a fly that resembles a bee, and sometimes it can be nothing but a figment of my imagination. My fear of bees is paralleled by my fear of getting raped a murdered. The same twinge of fear that I get when I think I'm being followed home in an dark alley is the same fear that consumes me when I see a bee land on a flower. Which is why this morning I spent three hours running from room to room after a wasp and bee hybrid creature made it's way into my apartment. This thing looked like the worlds leading scientists had gotten together to combine the DNA of a bumble bee and a taradactle and then released the monstrosity into my living room as some sort of sick joke.
I generally don't pick fights with insects because I'm lazy and not very fast, not to mention I have actually lost a fight to a spider once; but after the creature dive bombed my heirloom tomato salad shortly after taking a swing at my face, it meant war. I went for my choice weapon for dealing with household pests, and on all fours crawled into my bathroom to get the hair spray. Once in the bathroom I poked my head out to check on the status of the bee. He was in the dining room, reeking havoc on an old beer can. As I reached for the can of hair spray I remembered my last encounter with the very same can I was reaching for. Jen nearly killed me last month when I spent half an hour chasing fruit flies around the house with a lighter and her hair spray, which apparently costs $30 bucks. She wasn't happy and hair spray torches were out of the question because if there is one thing I've learned about Jen is that she will let the first offense go, but pissing her off twice about the same thing will end in castration.
My plan foiled, I called my mom. She'd know what to do. She instantly started laughing at my plight, "the hardest thing about getting divorced was having to kill bugs again," she said. "Just roll up some newspaper and kill it, it's just a bee." Clearly my mother wasn't grasping that I wasn't dealing with your ordinary bee and that news paper would have been child's play for the beast rocketing through my apartment. So I rolled up my yoga mat and started clubbing the bee, making contact only once, the bee spiraled down to the floor with such force my windows practically raddled to the brink of shattering. I had officially pissed off the bee and hung up on my mother to seek refuge in the bathroom.
It was time for a new plan, so I got my 20 inch box fan, opened the door, and tried blowing it out of the house. The hurricane winds only pissed the creature off further and it started charging for me only to be blocked by the box fan. Finally, I gave up and ran. At this point I feel I should mention I was sweating bullets and having a panic attack in the bathroom bomb shelter floor. After smoking a cigarette to calm my nerves, I crawled out of the bathroom with the stealth of ten ninjas. I spotted the bee resting on my coffee table and grabbed Tina Fey's memoir, "Bossy Pants" and charged with the force of a cannon ball. Letting out a battle cry that reached an octave I had previously though my voice was incapable of reaching, I bludgeoned the flying menace. It was over.
To my surprise after I killed the bee I had to sit down, as I was out of breath and sweating profusely. My hands were shaking as I reached for my phone to text my mom. "The deed was done." I said. She responded a few minutes later, "I'm glad you made it." As I read her text I laughed because even as an adult male I still call my mom when there is a bee in my house. The fact that she answers and talks me through such situations makes me grateful to have her as a mother. It's nice to know that she is always there to listen to my childish fears of bees and life. It's nice to know that if I had been stung, she would have been on the other line saying, "it's going to hurt, but it'll all be over soon. Now get a credit card."
On more than one occasion I have ran my car off of the road because a bee was on my dashboard, sometimes it's not even a bee but a fly that resembles a bee, and sometimes it can be nothing but a figment of my imagination. My fear of bees is paralleled by my fear of getting raped a murdered. The same twinge of fear that I get when I think I'm being followed home in an dark alley is the same fear that consumes me when I see a bee land on a flower. Which is why this morning I spent three hours running from room to room after a wasp and bee hybrid creature made it's way into my apartment. This thing looked like the worlds leading scientists had gotten together to combine the DNA of a bumble bee and a taradactle and then released the monstrosity into my living room as some sort of sick joke.
I generally don't pick fights with insects because I'm lazy and not very fast, not to mention I have actually lost a fight to a spider once; but after the creature dive bombed my heirloom tomato salad shortly after taking a swing at my face, it meant war. I went for my choice weapon for dealing with household pests, and on all fours crawled into my bathroom to get the hair spray. Once in the bathroom I poked my head out to check on the status of the bee. He was in the dining room, reeking havoc on an old beer can. As I reached for the can of hair spray I remembered my last encounter with the very same can I was reaching for. Jen nearly killed me last month when I spent half an hour chasing fruit flies around the house with a lighter and her hair spray, which apparently costs $30 bucks. She wasn't happy and hair spray torches were out of the question because if there is one thing I've learned about Jen is that she will let the first offense go, but pissing her off twice about the same thing will end in castration.
My plan foiled, I called my mom. She'd know what to do. She instantly started laughing at my plight, "the hardest thing about getting divorced was having to kill bugs again," she said. "Just roll up some newspaper and kill it, it's just a bee." Clearly my mother wasn't grasping that I wasn't dealing with your ordinary bee and that news paper would have been child's play for the beast rocketing through my apartment. So I rolled up my yoga mat and started clubbing the bee, making contact only once, the bee spiraled down to the floor with such force my windows practically raddled to the brink of shattering. I had officially pissed off the bee and hung up on my mother to seek refuge in the bathroom.
It was time for a new plan, so I got my 20 inch box fan, opened the door, and tried blowing it out of the house. The hurricane winds only pissed the creature off further and it started charging for me only to be blocked by the box fan. Finally, I gave up and ran. At this point I feel I should mention I was sweating bullets and having a panic attack in the bathroom bomb shelter floor. After smoking a cigarette to calm my nerves, I crawled out of the bathroom with the stealth of ten ninjas. I spotted the bee resting on my coffee table and grabbed Tina Fey's memoir, "Bossy Pants" and charged with the force of a cannon ball. Letting out a battle cry that reached an octave I had previously though my voice was incapable of reaching, I bludgeoned the flying menace. It was over.
To my surprise after I killed the bee I had to sit down, as I was out of breath and sweating profusely. My hands were shaking as I reached for my phone to text my mom. "The deed was done." I said. She responded a few minutes later, "I'm glad you made it." As I read her text I laughed because even as an adult male I still call my mom when there is a bee in my house. The fact that she answers and talks me through such situations makes me grateful to have her as a mother. It's nice to know that she is always there to listen to my childish fears of bees and life. It's nice to know that if I had been stung, she would have been on the other line saying, "it's going to hurt, but it'll all be over soon. Now get a credit card."
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Sissy boy.
I've had at least ten people in the last 48 hours tell me I look like a child molester, but God dammit, I want a mustache. I've been trying to will hair out of my face for years now and I'm finally, at age 23, able to push out enough upper lip and chin hair to give the illusion that I have a full goatee. Admittedly my facial hair grows in sporadic patches of blond and resembles something that would grow off of a orangutan's elbow, but I think I look great. To everyone else apparently, my facial hair grows perversely.
While I have trouble growing facial hair, I have no qualms about growing a neck beard. If I go even one day without shaving my neck I will have enough neck hair to fill a pillow case with. In fact, I think if I went a week, and got in a car wreck, and my air bag didn't deploy, my tuft of neck beard would keep me from getting whip lash. It would just hit the steering wheel and gently soften the blow of my neck. Sometimes though, I let my neck beard get out of hand and on those days, I feel profoundly masculine. Which is why now, more than ever, I am trying to grow a goatee. I need to feel like a man.
One thing I've noticed about gay men is that you are instantly put into one of two boxes, based on femininity or masculinity. "Hi, my name is Ryan, can I buy you a beer?" I might ask a handsome gentleman at a bar, but what he is really hearing is, "Hi, I'm Ryan, and I love getting fucked in the ass." Getting fucked in the ass, in the gay world, classifies you as a bottom. If you prefer to be the pitcher, then you are a top. When gay men meet each other for the first time, they are without a doubt deciding if the man in front of them likes to get fucked, or be fucked. It's just the way it works. When I flirt with bottoms, they think that I am a bottom, and will not give me the time of day.
If my masculinity were to be summed up by a sound, it would be the sound an English tea cup makes when it cheerily tinkers on the miniature plate beneath it. Because of this, many men think I am incapable of preforming the sexual role of a masculine top, and therefor write me off. Personally, I am both. Sex is fluid, sex is instinctual, and my sexual identity will never be put into one box or another; and I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at it. I don't want to be with someone romantically or sexually, if they think of themselves as a top or a bottom because it's limiting and boring.
Still, I have to cave to my social demands, and try to look the part. Try and appear more masculine. I've been working out everyday for months now, and my body looks less like a deflated balloon draped over a nail, and more like a Ken doll after a run in with a belt sander. I feel more masculine with muscles, and with facial hair. I don't know what kind of guy I'm trying to attract, Jen would say I'm trying to attract children, but I do know that at the moment and for the first time in years; I love the way I look. So the facial hair stays.
I've been struggling with my outwardly feminine inclinations for my entire life. I was seven the first time I got made fun of for it. At that age, I ran on the daycare's playground with my arms swinging behind me, my wrists limp, and my hands flopping up and down with the motion of me feet. Some kid pointed out the fact that I ran like a girl one day during a heated game of kick ball. After that my dad spent many nights teaching me how to, "run like a man" so I wouldn't get made fun of. He would place his balled up fists by his sides, his arms in 90 degree angles, and say, "hold your hands like this and move them back and forth with your feet." Then I would try, my hands going limp in front of me, and making me look like a gay T-Rex.
Then there was the time in eighth grade that I became aware of the boys in the locker room, and their impressive bush's. I thought it was really disgusting that everyone had mounds of pubic hair, but I was still jealous that I had not developed a grotesque curly forest between my legs. I remember my first pubic hair like it was yesterday. It was towards the end of the same year and my friends took me to an amusement park near Kansas City. We were on a roller-coaster called the Momba and moments before the coaster let us go down the first drop, I raised my hands above my head. While I was admiring the 250 foot view I noticed a weird curly thing attached to my arm pit. When I realized it was an armpit hair I didn't take my eyes off of it the entire ride. Through the twists and turns, ups and downs, I never took my eyes off it. I just watched it flail in the wind, relishing in the idea of being a man.
Recently my fascination with masculinity, especially in relation to myself, has lead me to scare off yet another man. Actually I'm pretty sure he was just an ass hole that stopped calling me back after three weeks. His name was Tony. Tony Bologna. Being me though, I have to pick apart everything I did to possibly have scared him off. The hard part is, I was literally so charming, the only thing I can think of possibly detouring him is my new love for not wearing deodorant. I love the way I smell, and he did not. I know this because he said, "Ryan I don't like the way you smell." Perhaps I should have taken that as a hint to maybe slap some deodorant on my pits, but I'm kind of in a fuck it mood lately and don't feel like appeasing a man for his affections. I'll work out and look good for men, but I will not cover up anything about myself, not even my scent...which I will admit can get pretty bad after an Indian buffet or night of binge drinking.
I'm in a weird limbo of finding a comfortable level of self expression that captures both my feminine side and my masculine side. The thought did occur to me, in a moment of self loathing, that maybe Tony Bologna just didn't think I was as masculine as he would have liked. Then I started to think that maybe I wasn't manly enough, maybe I wasn't man enough for him. Thankfully before I plummeted into a pity party summoned from my healing fear of my own femininity, I caught myself. I was just to much man for him. It's as simple as that.
While I have trouble growing facial hair, I have no qualms about growing a neck beard. If I go even one day without shaving my neck I will have enough neck hair to fill a pillow case with. In fact, I think if I went a week, and got in a car wreck, and my air bag didn't deploy, my tuft of neck beard would keep me from getting whip lash. It would just hit the steering wheel and gently soften the blow of my neck. Sometimes though, I let my neck beard get out of hand and on those days, I feel profoundly masculine. Which is why now, more than ever, I am trying to grow a goatee. I need to feel like a man.
One thing I've noticed about gay men is that you are instantly put into one of two boxes, based on femininity or masculinity. "Hi, my name is Ryan, can I buy you a beer?" I might ask a handsome gentleman at a bar, but what he is really hearing is, "Hi, I'm Ryan, and I love getting fucked in the ass." Getting fucked in the ass, in the gay world, classifies you as a bottom. If you prefer to be the pitcher, then you are a top. When gay men meet each other for the first time, they are without a doubt deciding if the man in front of them likes to get fucked, or be fucked. It's just the way it works. When I flirt with bottoms, they think that I am a bottom, and will not give me the time of day.
If my masculinity were to be summed up by a sound, it would be the sound an English tea cup makes when it cheerily tinkers on the miniature plate beneath it. Because of this, many men think I am incapable of preforming the sexual role of a masculine top, and therefor write me off. Personally, I am both. Sex is fluid, sex is instinctual, and my sexual identity will never be put into one box or another; and I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at it. I don't want to be with someone romantically or sexually, if they think of themselves as a top or a bottom because it's limiting and boring.
Still, I have to cave to my social demands, and try to look the part. Try and appear more masculine. I've been working out everyday for months now, and my body looks less like a deflated balloon draped over a nail, and more like a Ken doll after a run in with a belt sander. I feel more masculine with muscles, and with facial hair. I don't know what kind of guy I'm trying to attract, Jen would say I'm trying to attract children, but I do know that at the moment and for the first time in years; I love the way I look. So the facial hair stays.
I've been struggling with my outwardly feminine inclinations for my entire life. I was seven the first time I got made fun of for it. At that age, I ran on the daycare's playground with my arms swinging behind me, my wrists limp, and my hands flopping up and down with the motion of me feet. Some kid pointed out the fact that I ran like a girl one day during a heated game of kick ball. After that my dad spent many nights teaching me how to, "run like a man" so I wouldn't get made fun of. He would place his balled up fists by his sides, his arms in 90 degree angles, and say, "hold your hands like this and move them back and forth with your feet." Then I would try, my hands going limp in front of me, and making me look like a gay T-Rex.
Then there was the time in eighth grade that I became aware of the boys in the locker room, and their impressive bush's. I thought it was really disgusting that everyone had mounds of pubic hair, but I was still jealous that I had not developed a grotesque curly forest between my legs. I remember my first pubic hair like it was yesterday. It was towards the end of the same year and my friends took me to an amusement park near Kansas City. We were on a roller-coaster called the Momba and moments before the coaster let us go down the first drop, I raised my hands above my head. While I was admiring the 250 foot view I noticed a weird curly thing attached to my arm pit. When I realized it was an armpit hair I didn't take my eyes off of it the entire ride. Through the twists and turns, ups and downs, I never took my eyes off it. I just watched it flail in the wind, relishing in the idea of being a man.
Recently my fascination with masculinity, especially in relation to myself, has lead me to scare off yet another man. Actually I'm pretty sure he was just an ass hole that stopped calling me back after three weeks. His name was Tony. Tony Bologna. Being me though, I have to pick apart everything I did to possibly have scared him off. The hard part is, I was literally so charming, the only thing I can think of possibly detouring him is my new love for not wearing deodorant. I love the way I smell, and he did not. I know this because he said, "Ryan I don't like the way you smell." Perhaps I should have taken that as a hint to maybe slap some deodorant on my pits, but I'm kind of in a fuck it mood lately and don't feel like appeasing a man for his affections. I'll work out and look good for men, but I will not cover up anything about myself, not even my scent...which I will admit can get pretty bad after an Indian buffet or night of binge drinking.
I'm in a weird limbo of finding a comfortable level of self expression that captures both my feminine side and my masculine side. The thought did occur to me, in a moment of self loathing, that maybe Tony Bologna just didn't think I was as masculine as he would have liked. Then I started to think that maybe I wasn't manly enough, maybe I wasn't man enough for him. Thankfully before I plummeted into a pity party summoned from my healing fear of my own femininity, I caught myself. I was just to much man for him. It's as simple as that.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Silly Putty
I'm sitting next to a pregnant girl at Starbucks. She is creating a power point about breast feeding and how to lactate nutrient dense breast milk. Gross. People who prepare that much freak me out, I mean, I understand making a check list of items to bring on a cross country road trip, maybe even reading a book about safty while traveling across a continent. But to create a power point on a computer about something as simple and natural as breast feeding makes me uneasy.
I wonder if reading parenting books and lactation books actually help a new parent be a better parent. I don't think it does. For instance, I love zombie movies and I watch them regularly. I have seen through Dawn of the Dead that while shopping malls are a great place to hide, it's an even better place to be trapped. I have learned from the Resident Evil series that some zombies can climb walls and dig tunnels under jails, so I should be prepared for some freaky shit when it comes time to fight. I have examined that some zombies have feelings and when you hurt them they retaliate more and some aren't after brains but power. I have watched every zombie apocalypse movie imaginable and I am more than confident in my ability to survive in the event that the globe dies only to be reborn.
I never understood why people in zombie movies want to be cooped up in a building when obviously the best place to be is in a field with an aluminum baseball bat. Ax's stick in the heads, which is good when your not facing more than one zombies, bats are always the best choice. Dark is good. People are afraid of the dark in zombie movies. They are dead, zombies can't see in the dark any better than you can, shut the fuck up and sit still and you'll be fine. I know all of these things, and after kicking my roommates ass in a heated kung fu battle last week, I'm confident that I can kill the undead. Still, if I were to really face these things, face the undead; I would crumble into a corner like dry wall that's being gutted with a sludge hammer. Nothing can prepare a person for a zombie apocalypse and their is sure as shit nothing that can prepare a first time mother for parenthood.
I hold the same attitude towards self help books as I do parenting books. I once read a few chapters of a self help book called the Road to Recovery while taking a shit at a friends house. I felt inspired I guess, but only while reading it, when it came to actually dealing with my baggage I handled it on my own and without the suggested use of a montre. The best self help a person can endure is a realistic perspective and a mirror. Books are rarely a mirror for everyone. And I'm just now realizing that each new man I date is not a mirror of the last and that to encapsulate every experience I've had, good or bad and hold that image next to a new one is unhealthy. I've read a lot of books on love, taking nothing but a skewed image of what love should be for me. So far in comparison to the books I've read, my love life is about as exciting as a molting spider.
I've learned a lot about myself in my short adult life through men. I've learned that cocaine dens and transexuals are fun, but living and loving under a roof riddled with both is devastating and can take years to build back yourself. I've learned that no matter how much you will someone to get help or help someone, substances are always a first priority and to expect anything else will kill your heart and take everything you have to piece it together again. I've learned to love myself and I'm learning to love people who love themselves. But with all of these things I've taken from broken men I've loved, the journey of self expression and sexual exploration and the strength to be good to myself and leave when someone else is not. With all those things I've learned, all the things I know; if I were to face those things, face love, I would crumble like dry wall.
So no. I don't think parenting books work at all.
I wonder if reading parenting books and lactation books actually help a new parent be a better parent. I don't think it does. For instance, I love zombie movies and I watch them regularly. I have seen through Dawn of the Dead that while shopping malls are a great place to hide, it's an even better place to be trapped. I have learned from the Resident Evil series that some zombies can climb walls and dig tunnels under jails, so I should be prepared for some freaky shit when it comes time to fight. I have examined that some zombies have feelings and when you hurt them they retaliate more and some aren't after brains but power. I have watched every zombie apocalypse movie imaginable and I am more than confident in my ability to survive in the event that the globe dies only to be reborn.
I never understood why people in zombie movies want to be cooped up in a building when obviously the best place to be is in a field with an aluminum baseball bat. Ax's stick in the heads, which is good when your not facing more than one zombies, bats are always the best choice. Dark is good. People are afraid of the dark in zombie movies. They are dead, zombies can't see in the dark any better than you can, shut the fuck up and sit still and you'll be fine. I know all of these things, and after kicking my roommates ass in a heated kung fu battle last week, I'm confident that I can kill the undead. Still, if I were to really face these things, face the undead; I would crumble into a corner like dry wall that's being gutted with a sludge hammer. Nothing can prepare a person for a zombie apocalypse and their is sure as shit nothing that can prepare a first time mother for parenthood.
I hold the same attitude towards self help books as I do parenting books. I once read a few chapters of a self help book called the Road to Recovery while taking a shit at a friends house. I felt inspired I guess, but only while reading it, when it came to actually dealing with my baggage I handled it on my own and without the suggested use of a montre. The best self help a person can endure is a realistic perspective and a mirror. Books are rarely a mirror for everyone. And I'm just now realizing that each new man I date is not a mirror of the last and that to encapsulate every experience I've had, good or bad and hold that image next to a new one is unhealthy. I've read a lot of books on love, taking nothing but a skewed image of what love should be for me. So far in comparison to the books I've read, my love life is about as exciting as a molting spider.
I've learned a lot about myself in my short adult life through men. I've learned that cocaine dens and transexuals are fun, but living and loving under a roof riddled with both is devastating and can take years to build back yourself. I've learned that no matter how much you will someone to get help or help someone, substances are always a first priority and to expect anything else will kill your heart and take everything you have to piece it together again. I've learned to love myself and I'm learning to love people who love themselves. But with all of these things I've taken from broken men I've loved, the journey of self expression and sexual exploration and the strength to be good to myself and leave when someone else is not. With all those things I've learned, all the things I know; if I were to face those things, face love, I would crumble like dry wall.
So no. I don't think parenting books work at all.
Putty.
I recently was blessed with a summer fling. I've always wanted one, I've always wanted to fall in love in a summer or kiss someone while sitting in grass under the universe's welcoming glow. I'm not falling in love, but I am infatuated and it is summer and we do make out and stuff. I think it's a summer fling, but who knows. Gay men seem to be scared of labels, I am not one of those men. I think he is though. At any rate, he likes bright colors, smiles incessantly and holds me really nicely.
The prospect of dating in the summer fascinates me, because it's foreign, as I either date in the lonely months of winter or I date men who can't process the words, "lets go on a nature walk." I've never dated someone who kissed me under that stars. I've always wanted to. I've always been eager to taste the lips of a man, and at that moment feel the universal nudge. I almost had it once, with Cow. We had taken a road trip to a hippie festival in Minnesota with our mutual friends Aurora and Bre. It was mid June and Cow and I had been dating for about three months.
Our road trip started by me locking the keys in the trunk and Aurora showing up with almost no luggage with so much whiskey in her stomach her face swelled. After Aurora danced on my car in heels, leaving dents as deep as oil mils, and having the security guard at a near by art school unlock my car with a crow bar, I started to feel like the universe was telling me something. As if it were telling me to clench my but hole and get ready for the ride, because I was about to go on a wild road trip with someone I was going to fall wildly in love with.
The first night there were no lights. We were driving Auora's 1968 beater she picked up from her father who lived in Minnesota, coming back from a party in the middle of a forest. Her car began to overheat, and we had to pull over on a desolate dark highway. While waiting for the car to cool, we rested our heads on the still warm pavement, I could hear my hair crunch, and we were astonished by the intensity and power of the stars. I leaned in to kiss Cows cheek. He turned away. When he felt my embarrassment and disappointed he put his pinkey around mine. That's all he could give me, and I took it.
Still convinced Cow possessed the ability to give me my dream kiss under the heavens, I tried again while we found ourselves on top of a building with no way down, after stealing my art from a gallery ran by shit for brains. We had just finished hoisting down the last painting from the window when we decided to take a break on the roof. I plopped my head in Cow's lap. His small hands rested at his sides soaking up pebbles of those tiny rocks on roofs (I read once those are actually meteorites), we were both staring at the three stars visible through the smog of Kansas City. I asked him to kiss me and he said, "It just doesn't feel right right now." I should mention that the window we came out of, had since shut under its own weight, leaving us stranded and waiting for our friend Maria to come with a ladder. Maybe it wasn't the right time, but it should have been.
I held out hope that Cow would kiss me and I would feel that universal nudge, but all I felt was the universes hand taking my own and telling me to follow it away from him. I feel that love awakens people, and I think that through the love that I have had, I can feel the universe. Mostly I feel it when it's telling me to leave. Some people call this intuition, but I don't think those people have loved a bad man and have experienced the spiritual pull to escape it's bodies return to that man. I have loved bad men and I have watched good men who I loved become bad men.
My friends often asked me when I was with Cow, why I was with Cow. After Cow flicked a cigarette in my face in front of my peers, it became hard to justify why I stayed. Thankfully though, I'm damn good at denial in addition to being ritiously convening. Cow will be the last time I do that.
I renounce my love of shitty men. Tony is the boy I'm infatuated with now. He is kind. And the universe isn't pulling me in any direction, it's telling me to be patient and still. I trust this and so I am still.
The prospect of dating in the summer fascinates me, because it's foreign, as I either date in the lonely months of winter or I date men who can't process the words, "lets go on a nature walk." I've never dated someone who kissed me under that stars. I've always wanted to. I've always been eager to taste the lips of a man, and at that moment feel the universal nudge. I almost had it once, with Cow. We had taken a road trip to a hippie festival in Minnesota with our mutual friends Aurora and Bre. It was mid June and Cow and I had been dating for about three months.
Our road trip started by me locking the keys in the trunk and Aurora showing up with almost no luggage with so much whiskey in her stomach her face swelled. After Aurora danced on my car in heels, leaving dents as deep as oil mils, and having the security guard at a near by art school unlock my car with a crow bar, I started to feel like the universe was telling me something. As if it were telling me to clench my but hole and get ready for the ride, because I was about to go on a wild road trip with someone I was going to fall wildly in love with.
The first night there were no lights. We were driving Auora's 1968 beater she picked up from her father who lived in Minnesota, coming back from a party in the middle of a forest. Her car began to overheat, and we had to pull over on a desolate dark highway. While waiting for the car to cool, we rested our heads on the still warm pavement, I could hear my hair crunch, and we were astonished by the intensity and power of the stars. I leaned in to kiss Cows cheek. He turned away. When he felt my embarrassment and disappointed he put his pinkey around mine. That's all he could give me, and I took it.
Still convinced Cow possessed the ability to give me my dream kiss under the heavens, I tried again while we found ourselves on top of a building with no way down, after stealing my art from a gallery ran by shit for brains. We had just finished hoisting down the last painting from the window when we decided to take a break on the roof. I plopped my head in Cow's lap. His small hands rested at his sides soaking up pebbles of those tiny rocks on roofs (I read once those are actually meteorites), we were both staring at the three stars visible through the smog of Kansas City. I asked him to kiss me and he said, "It just doesn't feel right right now." I should mention that the window we came out of, had since shut under its own weight, leaving us stranded and waiting for our friend Maria to come with a ladder. Maybe it wasn't the right time, but it should have been.
I held out hope that Cow would kiss me and I would feel that universal nudge, but all I felt was the universes hand taking my own and telling me to follow it away from him. I feel that love awakens people, and I think that through the love that I have had, I can feel the universe. Mostly I feel it when it's telling me to leave. Some people call this intuition, but I don't think those people have loved a bad man and have experienced the spiritual pull to escape it's bodies return to that man. I have loved bad men and I have watched good men who I loved become bad men.
My friends often asked me when I was with Cow, why I was with Cow. After Cow flicked a cigarette in my face in front of my peers, it became hard to justify why I stayed. Thankfully though, I'm damn good at denial in addition to being ritiously convening. Cow will be the last time I do that.
I renounce my love of shitty men. Tony is the boy I'm infatuated with now. He is kind. And the universe isn't pulling me in any direction, it's telling me to be patient and still. I trust this and so I am still.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
I love the 80's
I don't know why, after watching a gun battle in the parking lot attached to my apartment building last week, I still thought it was safe to leave my scooter parked outside, unchained. I awoke a few days ago to the sun sleepily poking out of passing storm clouds, and warming my face with it's optimistic soft glow. Birds were bellowing the same tune, and as I became engulfed in it's beauty I sat up to rub the sleep out of my eyes. My bed sits right next to the window, so usually the first thing I see every morning is a dumpster and my scooter sitting in an empty parking lot, instead on this morning, I saw only a dumpster. "FUUUCK!" I screamed into the part of my brain responsible for operating and coordinating the rotten caverns that suppresses my emotions and reactions. Had this part of my brain not been highly active that morning, I might have over reacted and done something like kill myself or worse, immediately purchased a new scooter on my credit card I recently opened to take a road trip with.
Thankfully though, that part of my brain still has enough juice left in it to fight off my true self. I did, search for my scooter for about three hours though. I walked half the city, going into every back ally way, looking in every dumpster and stopping by every pawn shop. The only things I were able to find were homeless people and garbage, sometimes even piled on top of one another. That shy playful sun that woke me up by playing patty cake with my eye lashes decided to say fuck it and left me searching for my scooter behind ghetto apartments in the pouring rain. I found myself, after hopping a series of fences, in someones back yard. In this back yard there was a small, in-ground pool overflowing with green water and leaves. I sat there and watched the rain drops pound against the murky water for a moment before I teared up, I sucked the tears back into my eyes and blamed the rain for the wet stains on my cheek. "FUCK!" It was raining so hard I forced water away from my lips with the enunciation of the letter F. "Fuck."
Startlingly, I wasn't crying because my beloved scooter was gone forever, probably being dissected in a underground welding shop by lepers. I wasn't even crying because a hurricane was dumping water on my head. I had to suck tears back into my eyes because as I stared at the water rippling in the downpour, I thought of Cow. Just two months ago, we were together and in Chicago. We were standing by the sears tower, rain slipping through the sky scrappers in sheets of forewarning gray. I saw Cows face in that pool, and I couldn't help but spiral into that memory.
I've been doing that a lot lately, going about my day perfectly content in whatever I may be doing when BAM, I pick up a Kiwi start sobbing because Cow and I ate a Kiwi together once and he said he didn't like them. I swear to God, yesterday I was driving to work and 80's music on the radio when Naked Eyes came on singing their only hit, "Always something there to remind me." I think I may be the only person in the world who has ever had an emotional response to that song other than promptly turning it off, but I cried like a little girl while singing the lyrics to my steering wheel. But now, this is taking form in my memory of Scooty, my stolen scooter. For instance today, I was helping a customer out to his car to load some smelly compost into his trunk. He had tan lines that cut his biceps in half; I found myself becoming irate in my mind because not long ago, when I had a scooter and drove to work in the sun, I had tan lines that cut my biceps in half. But now, because I don't have a scooter, I'm doomed to pay high gas prices and stay pasty white.
I've been fantasizing about what I would do if I had the people who stole my scooter chained in my living room to a cold metal chair. I would definitely need a pair of pliers and a ball gag, you know, to silence the screams. My mind even traveled to a fantasy in which I died on the highway while driving my new motorcycle to work. Somehow my mom would meet the people who stole my scooter in this fantasy and scream, "Why did you steal it? He would have never bought that motorcycle if you hadn't stolen his scooter. His scooter couldn't go on the highway, but YOU are the reason he's dead because he bought a motorcycle. How can you live with yourselves." This fantasy gets good when the scooter bandits are forced to live with that guilt for the rest of their lives. I'm not sure if this type of thinking is normal or healthy, but it doesn't change the fact that my brain is wired in such a way that promotes over active imagination with an inclination to tragedy.
Jen's been really supportive through this difficult time for me, she even lets me drink her rum, quietly adding it to the long list of things I owe her. I think she tacked the rum next to the 100 rolls of toilet paper I've used but never purchased. I love her for this, which is why I'm moving with her to Florida in 6 months. She mentioned the move to me after visiting our friend Eric in St. Petersburg two weeks ago, where she taught baby dolphins algebra and para-sailed with German prostitutes. Or at least that's what it sounded like she said while screaming into my phone, "RYAN, you are moving here with me when our lease is up," and I instantly agreed to follow her. I've needed to escape Kansas City for a few years now, and I think Florida might be the answer to my plea.
Jen's been promising Florida to me for almost five years now and had her car not broken down two summers ago, we would have been there already. I'm thankful for this now, as my master plan was to become the biggest stand up comic in drag to sweep the nation. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea, but I do know that I was so dead set on becoming a stand up drag sensation that had her car not fallen apart, my dick would be duck taped to my back hair right now. That's one thing I learned when I lived with Star, my transsexual roommate, being a tranny whore is a lot of work. In fact, cross dressing in general is one of the most time consuming hobby or lifestyles out there, next to hoarding unique sand granules.
This time I'm planning to go with no plan, Jen on the other hand, is going to build a print publication empire and there is now doubt in my mind she will achieve this goal. I know. I worked for her at the newspaper she was EIC of. She is a powerhouse cunt to work for, but she gets shit done and she's always well connected. I just want to get out so that I may find some peace, find myself in a city untouched by the ruins of failed relationships, stolen scooters, and an art community I feel nothing for. I'm looking forward to scooting down a a strange Florida street, where there is nothing ever there to remind me.
A place where Naked Eyes will fall on deaf ears.
Thankfully though, that part of my brain still has enough juice left in it to fight off my true self. I did, search for my scooter for about three hours though. I walked half the city, going into every back ally way, looking in every dumpster and stopping by every pawn shop. The only things I were able to find were homeless people and garbage, sometimes even piled on top of one another. That shy playful sun that woke me up by playing patty cake with my eye lashes decided to say fuck it and left me searching for my scooter behind ghetto apartments in the pouring rain. I found myself, after hopping a series of fences, in someones back yard. In this back yard there was a small, in-ground pool overflowing with green water and leaves. I sat there and watched the rain drops pound against the murky water for a moment before I teared up, I sucked the tears back into my eyes and blamed the rain for the wet stains on my cheek. "FUCK!" It was raining so hard I forced water away from my lips with the enunciation of the letter F. "Fuck."
Startlingly, I wasn't crying because my beloved scooter was gone forever, probably being dissected in a underground welding shop by lepers. I wasn't even crying because a hurricane was dumping water on my head. I had to suck tears back into my eyes because as I stared at the water rippling in the downpour, I thought of Cow. Just two months ago, we were together and in Chicago. We were standing by the sears tower, rain slipping through the sky scrappers in sheets of forewarning gray. I saw Cows face in that pool, and I couldn't help but spiral into that memory.
I've been doing that a lot lately, going about my day perfectly content in whatever I may be doing when BAM, I pick up a Kiwi start sobbing because Cow and I ate a Kiwi together once and he said he didn't like them. I swear to God, yesterday I was driving to work and 80's music on the radio when Naked Eyes came on singing their only hit, "Always something there to remind me." I think I may be the only person in the world who has ever had an emotional response to that song other than promptly turning it off, but I cried like a little girl while singing the lyrics to my steering wheel. But now, this is taking form in my memory of Scooty, my stolen scooter. For instance today, I was helping a customer out to his car to load some smelly compost into his trunk. He had tan lines that cut his biceps in half; I found myself becoming irate in my mind because not long ago, when I had a scooter and drove to work in the sun, I had tan lines that cut my biceps in half. But now, because I don't have a scooter, I'm doomed to pay high gas prices and stay pasty white.
I've been fantasizing about what I would do if I had the people who stole my scooter chained in my living room to a cold metal chair. I would definitely need a pair of pliers and a ball gag, you know, to silence the screams. My mind even traveled to a fantasy in which I died on the highway while driving my new motorcycle to work. Somehow my mom would meet the people who stole my scooter in this fantasy and scream, "Why did you steal it? He would have never bought that motorcycle if you hadn't stolen his scooter. His scooter couldn't go on the highway, but YOU are the reason he's dead because he bought a motorcycle. How can you live with yourselves." This fantasy gets good when the scooter bandits are forced to live with that guilt for the rest of their lives. I'm not sure if this type of thinking is normal or healthy, but it doesn't change the fact that my brain is wired in such a way that promotes over active imagination with an inclination to tragedy.
Jen's been really supportive through this difficult time for me, she even lets me drink her rum, quietly adding it to the long list of things I owe her. I think she tacked the rum next to the 100 rolls of toilet paper I've used but never purchased. I love her for this, which is why I'm moving with her to Florida in 6 months. She mentioned the move to me after visiting our friend Eric in St. Petersburg two weeks ago, where she taught baby dolphins algebra and para-sailed with German prostitutes. Or at least that's what it sounded like she said while screaming into my phone, "RYAN, you are moving here with me when our lease is up," and I instantly agreed to follow her. I've needed to escape Kansas City for a few years now, and I think Florida might be the answer to my plea.
Jen's been promising Florida to me for almost five years now and had her car not broken down two summers ago, we would have been there already. I'm thankful for this now, as my master plan was to become the biggest stand up comic in drag to sweep the nation. I don't know why I thought this was a good idea, but I do know that I was so dead set on becoming a stand up drag sensation that had her car not fallen apart, my dick would be duck taped to my back hair right now. That's one thing I learned when I lived with Star, my transsexual roommate, being a tranny whore is a lot of work. In fact, cross dressing in general is one of the most time consuming hobby or lifestyles out there, next to hoarding unique sand granules.
This time I'm planning to go with no plan, Jen on the other hand, is going to build a print publication empire and there is now doubt in my mind she will achieve this goal. I know. I worked for her at the newspaper she was EIC of. She is a powerhouse cunt to work for, but she gets shit done and she's always well connected. I just want to get out so that I may find some peace, find myself in a city untouched by the ruins of failed relationships, stolen scooters, and an art community I feel nothing for. I'm looking forward to scooting down a a strange Florida street, where there is nothing ever there to remind me.
A place where Naked Eyes will fall on deaf ears.
Friday, May 20, 2011
Chicago
It’s nearly eight in the morning and I’m hung-over in the Chicago union station. Cow is buying our tickets for the train back to Lumbard somewhere and I’m left here in a sitting area surrounded by thousands of people trying to get to work. They look like Chihuahuas to me, they are alert, jittery, their movements are chaotic. It's as if s if at any moment they will stop dead in their tracks and shake until they pee. I hate Chihuahuas, they have such high stress levels, just being around them makes me anxious. That’s why if I were a dog, I would be a pug. Pugs are lazy, have trouble doing simple things like breathing or walking, and are mind bogglingly adorable.
I think I hate Chihuahuas because my grandma forced me to hate them by having at least 3 of them yapping within a foot of her at all times. She has three Chihuahuas at the moment, one of which is so old, it's jaw has literally fallen off (she feeds this one soggy dog food). She has potty trained them to poop only on her rugs, and pee only on her furniture. She lets them outside to go pee sometimes and they just look at her like she's crazy, then come inside and unload their pancake breakfast on her divan.
Being in Chicago is like sitting in my grandma's living room for days. I love my grandma, and I love this city don't get me wrong, but it's overwhelming. Cow and I came here for my friend Kiley's wedding. Kiley is my first friend to get married and it makes me feel old, whats next? Soon my friends will start procreating.
I met Kiley in high school Geology class. This was during the time when I dated fabulously beautiful girls and treated them as show horses, leading them by the reigns down the hallways as a trophy of my sexuality. "LOOK, I'm not gay I have a girlfriend!" My facade was deteriorating though because rumor had it that I was the impotent gymnast boy who broke up with girls when they wanted to get sexual. Kiley knew this and promptly declined my request to make her my cover girl.
I came out shortly after Kiley turned me down and I began cereal dating boys. We quickly became friends once we discovered that we liked to stalk our ex's, a past time bonded over many drive-bys and countless stakeouts. She and I would drive past my teenage heart throb ex-boyfriend Doug's house and listen to Kelly Clarkson and Nine Inch Nails albums while wallowing in our single self pity. Kiley was my friend I went to when I needed cheering up, I'd like to think I was the same for her and since we were perpetually down about something we spent a lot of time together.
She is the one that invented shopping cart bumper cars. In an effort to get me pumped back up for a night of debauchery, she drove to the Grocery store parking lot in her green Cavelier, aligned the car with a shopping cart. Her bumper tapping the back of the cart, she floored it. After bringing the cart to a minimum of 35 miles per hour she slammed on her breaks, sending the cart hurling into a median or building. This turned into a regular thing, hitting up parking lots with those plastic kiddy carts, with cartoon faces on the front.
It's weird that she's getting married now. It's weird because I don't know her anymore, the Kiley I know is frozen in time four years ago, the last time I saw her and lived in Illinois. She came over to help me pack when Brian decided to make me homeless and loveless. She printed off mapquest directions to my mom's house in Kansas, and she hugged me goodbye. Kiley is still that girl to me, not the engaged woman who deals with insurance information for a living. I'm scared to see her, I'm scared to see my old friends, I'm scared that they wont match up with the images and memories I have of them. The wedding is in two days, that's how long I have to mentally prepare myself, in the mean time I'll try and enjoy Chicago.
Cow and I met up with out friend Caffy last night and she took us to a party. We each drank the two 40oz malt liquors we bought before getting a cab. Everyone at the party seemed to have forgotten what a shower was, because not only did they smell like suffocated farts, but they looked so dirty that if you put a white glove on and swiped a finger on their foreheads your finger would be black. Not a normal black either, a brownish sick black, like the dark due that grows on damp tree trunks. Which is why now, at union station, my head feels like a mastodon just put on platforms and stomped on my temples until its hoofs were raw and bloody.
Something about having a hangover makes me a little more observant than usual, perhaps because my brain is slowing everything down. The two lanes of human traffic moving in opposite directions down the thin hallways of this train station, though chaotic, is slowed down almost to a stop. I can see the panic in the faces of people who are late for work or people who are having an inner battle about what type of coffee to get at the Dunkin Doughnuts across from where I sit. People look panicked here. I’ve met some really nice people, but for the most part, the population here can’t seem to keep up with themselves. Like their bodies are moving forward, but their spiritual self is five feet behind reaching out, begging for a rest.
People have no concept of personal space here either. I’m in a food court thing surrounded by tables and I’m watching perfect strangers sit down to eat their breakfast with perfect strangers. They don’t make eye contact with one another, or acknowledge each other, they just sit and stare at their food until it’s gone. No one else seems to matter, it’s just them, and a chair. Like the moment they sit down they get to simply exist with the solitude of their thoughts. Like most moments though, they are fleeting and hard to hold onto.
I just watched a woman sit down across from him and as if her head was made of led, slammed her cranium on the table to take a power nap. The guy just looked up from the book he was reading, looked at his new table guest and slowly lowered his eyes back to his literature.
Cow is perfectly content. On the train here he looked like a kid going to Disney Land, his fingers pressed against the train windows and his breath fogging up the glass with his excited respiration. There is a weird tension between us, something brought to the surface by sitting in a car together for 8 hours and not speaking. He read psychology magazines and I thought about things to talk about.
It started to rain last night, we stood under an overhang by the sears tower, smoking while the rain slithered through skyscrapers. Rain is different in a city like Chicago. Traffic, construction, voices, they are all silenced by the fall of rain. The city calms when it rains, becomes quiet and muffled. Like the static of an old TV. We ran to the nearest store and bought umbrellas.
As Cow walked in front of me his short legs moving at an exhausting pace, I started to get the faint feeling the reason for the strange tension between us was that we were frozen in time. The Cow I loved exhisted back in Kansas City, over a year ago. I didn't know the person walking infront of me, I didn't love him. He stopped and was standing in front of me looking at the city lights which casted a dramatic contrast over his face, and in that moment I saw the same face I fell so hard for almost two years ago. A face that was younger and less aware. Like most moments though, it was fleeting and hard to hold on to. We continued, two pugs walking forward in a city full of Chihuahuas.
I think I hate Chihuahuas because my grandma forced me to hate them by having at least 3 of them yapping within a foot of her at all times. She has three Chihuahuas at the moment, one of which is so old, it's jaw has literally fallen off (she feeds this one soggy dog food). She has potty trained them to poop only on her rugs, and pee only on her furniture. She lets them outside to go pee sometimes and they just look at her like she's crazy, then come inside and unload their pancake breakfast on her divan.
Being in Chicago is like sitting in my grandma's living room for days. I love my grandma, and I love this city don't get me wrong, but it's overwhelming. Cow and I came here for my friend Kiley's wedding. Kiley is my first friend to get married and it makes me feel old, whats next? Soon my friends will start procreating.
I met Kiley in high school Geology class. This was during the time when I dated fabulously beautiful girls and treated them as show horses, leading them by the reigns down the hallways as a trophy of my sexuality. "LOOK, I'm not gay I have a girlfriend!" My facade was deteriorating though because rumor had it that I was the impotent gymnast boy who broke up with girls when they wanted to get sexual. Kiley knew this and promptly declined my request to make her my cover girl.
I came out shortly after Kiley turned me down and I began cereal dating boys. We quickly became friends once we discovered that we liked to stalk our ex's, a past time bonded over many drive-bys and countless stakeouts. She and I would drive past my teenage heart throb ex-boyfriend Doug's house and listen to Kelly Clarkson and Nine Inch Nails albums while wallowing in our single self pity. Kiley was my friend I went to when I needed cheering up, I'd like to think I was the same for her and since we were perpetually down about something we spent a lot of time together.
She is the one that invented shopping cart bumper cars. In an effort to get me pumped back up for a night of debauchery, she drove to the Grocery store parking lot in her green Cavelier, aligned the car with a shopping cart. Her bumper tapping the back of the cart, she floored it. After bringing the cart to a minimum of 35 miles per hour she slammed on her breaks, sending the cart hurling into a median or building. This turned into a regular thing, hitting up parking lots with those plastic kiddy carts, with cartoon faces on the front.
It's weird that she's getting married now. It's weird because I don't know her anymore, the Kiley I know is frozen in time four years ago, the last time I saw her and lived in Illinois. She came over to help me pack when Brian decided to make me homeless and loveless. She printed off mapquest directions to my mom's house in Kansas, and she hugged me goodbye. Kiley is still that girl to me, not the engaged woman who deals with insurance information for a living. I'm scared to see her, I'm scared to see my old friends, I'm scared that they wont match up with the images and memories I have of them. The wedding is in two days, that's how long I have to mentally prepare myself, in the mean time I'll try and enjoy Chicago.
Cow and I met up with out friend Caffy last night and she took us to a party. We each drank the two 40oz malt liquors we bought before getting a cab. Everyone at the party seemed to have forgotten what a shower was, because not only did they smell like suffocated farts, but they looked so dirty that if you put a white glove on and swiped a finger on their foreheads your finger would be black. Not a normal black either, a brownish sick black, like the dark due that grows on damp tree trunks. Which is why now, at union station, my head feels like a mastodon just put on platforms and stomped on my temples until its hoofs were raw and bloody.
Something about having a hangover makes me a little more observant than usual, perhaps because my brain is slowing everything down. The two lanes of human traffic moving in opposite directions down the thin hallways of this train station, though chaotic, is slowed down almost to a stop. I can see the panic in the faces of people who are late for work or people who are having an inner battle about what type of coffee to get at the Dunkin Doughnuts across from where I sit. People look panicked here. I’ve met some really nice people, but for the most part, the population here can’t seem to keep up with themselves. Like their bodies are moving forward, but their spiritual self is five feet behind reaching out, begging for a rest.
People have no concept of personal space here either. I’m in a food court thing surrounded by tables and I’m watching perfect strangers sit down to eat their breakfast with perfect strangers. They don’t make eye contact with one another, or acknowledge each other, they just sit and stare at their food until it’s gone. No one else seems to matter, it’s just them, and a chair. Like the moment they sit down they get to simply exist with the solitude of their thoughts. Like most moments though, they are fleeting and hard to hold onto.
I just watched a woman sit down across from him and as if her head was made of led, slammed her cranium on the table to take a power nap. The guy just looked up from the book he was reading, looked at his new table guest and slowly lowered his eyes back to his literature.
Cow is perfectly content. On the train here he looked like a kid going to Disney Land, his fingers pressed against the train windows and his breath fogging up the glass with his excited respiration. There is a weird tension between us, something brought to the surface by sitting in a car together for 8 hours and not speaking. He read psychology magazines and I thought about things to talk about.
It started to rain last night, we stood under an overhang by the sears tower, smoking while the rain slithered through skyscrapers. Rain is different in a city like Chicago. Traffic, construction, voices, they are all silenced by the fall of rain. The city calms when it rains, becomes quiet and muffled. Like the static of an old TV. We ran to the nearest store and bought umbrellas.
As Cow walked in front of me his short legs moving at an exhausting pace, I started to get the faint feeling the reason for the strange tension between us was that we were frozen in time. The Cow I loved exhisted back in Kansas City, over a year ago. I didn't know the person walking infront of me, I didn't love him. He stopped and was standing in front of me looking at the city lights which casted a dramatic contrast over his face, and in that moment I saw the same face I fell so hard for almost two years ago. A face that was younger and less aware. Like most moments though, it was fleeting and hard to hold on to. We continued, two pugs walking forward in a city full of Chihuahuas.
Friday, May 6, 2011
Momma Bear.
I am probably the worse son in the world, in addition to turning my mother in to social services when I was 13 because she insulted my hair, I perpetually forget her birthday and almost always neglect to get her anything for almost every other holiday including mothers day. There's really no excuse either, I mean, I work in retail so I'm surrounded by mothers day cards every year. This year though, my mother planned ahead and called me yesterday to remind me that mothers day was in two days. "I know mom, GOD!" I said defensively, both of us knowing my surprise. I'd like to say I would have remembered, but honestly had she not called I would have totally forgot mothers day just like how I forgot her birthday for the past 23 years.
When my parents were still married it helped that my dad was able to bare some of the blame for forgetting these days of celebration, but it's been a long time since then and there has been a lot of apologies on my behalf. She always forgives me, but she has an otherworldly ability to not forget. It's like scientists shoved three elephant brains into her skull at birth, her enlarged cranium hidden beneath her bellowing Ferrah Fawcett waves. She still likes to remind me of the Christmas gift I gave her 15 years ago, four days after Christmas. I didn't know what to get her so I went to a christian book store and bought her a water fountain with a huge guardian angel pouring water out of a pail into a whimsical pit. Upon opening this late gift, my atheist mother looked like I had just punched her in the gut, because she held her stomach as she winced in pain. At first I thought she was so touched by my spiritual gift that she was about to cry, but that thought was quickly silenced when she started laughing like an exhausted goose, "what in the hell is this?" she shrieked. I remember feeling stupid, and I remember her seeing this in my eyes. She placed the angel water fall at her bed side and has reluctantly left it there ever since, taking it with her every time she moves.
I'd like to say that I learned my lesson in regards to getting my mother things she hates, but last year when I gave her a compost pit, she puked. "This whole going green thing is making me turn green!" she screamed in to the phone as she poked rotting food I had put in the plastic bin with a stick. "Get this thing the hell away from my house it smells and there are maggots, it's gross." Come to think of it, I'm just terrible at getting gifts for people. Kayla, Jen, and Rachelle can attest to this fact, as they happily did last week when over a few drinks painstakingly retold the stories of my bad gifts. "Last year, Ryan got me this awful picture of a a woman's hands with four inch nails poking an ice cream sunday," said Kayla. "For my birthday Ryan got me a stupid Oscar Wild book that was missing half the pages, have you read Oscar Wild, it's boring as fuck." I get it! I suck at this shit.
My brother Nick on the other hand is the master of gift giving. He always shows up to family gatherings with something for my mother, a new bottle of lotion here, a new piece of jewelry there; meanwhile I'm stuffing the organic tea bag I got her back into my pocket in shame. My mom though, loves us both the same. I've always been in awe of how much she loves us, and I've always under-loved her because I've never known how to replicate that immense of a love. Take for example the day I told her I was gay.
I had fallen in love with my first boyfriend Doug, who aside from cheating on me and telling me I could stand to loose a couple pounds, was a really great guy. When Doug broke up with me by letting me catch him cheating on me, I couldn't move. It was 6:30 am and I was shitting for the millionth time that morning, an emotional response shared by both my mother and I, practically every time we ever upset each other we have to take a break in arguing to take a dump. I came downstairs, where my mother was sitting on our couch and she said, "whats wrong baby, you don't poop that much if somethings not wrong," trying to cheer me up. At that, I lost it and began bawling in her arms, "Doug broke up with me!!!" I cried into her hair. "Are you telling me your gay?" She asked, pushing me away from her to look at my face. I nodded my head yes, and she pulled me so close to her I thought our skin cells were going to fuse together. "I'm so glad you finally told me."
Apparently she has known I was a nut gobbler since I was three and pretended to be Dorthy from The Wizard of Oz in her high heels and a wig made of tissues and blankeys. She told me she decided then to accept me for who I was. Again, I don't know how to love this woman in a outwardly reciprocal way, she has me outmatched. "At least Nick will be able to have kids, I still want grand babies" she would say often. A dream that was smashed when Nick announced that he too, was a raging homosexual. Unlike me, Nick actually surprised everyone with his gayness. Nick stands at almost six foot tall and is built like a tree trunk. Not fat, but like his arm bones are about as thick as a baseball bat. He is an emotional stone and physical wall, and displays a femininity possessed by the tangled pubic bushes of professional wrestlers. No one saw it coming, not even me.
"Well God dammit, I have two gay sons," said my mother, combing the hair from her face with her finger tips and swirling a glass of wine in the other hand. "This is going to take some getting used to." It took her about a week before she was more excited about us being gay than we were, her pride in us is un-silencing and forever present, even in moments when we behave like pre-maddona alcoholics at family gatherings. Last time Nick and I attended a family gathering, we got stoned in his car and laughed at the dinner table, trying to explain how funny my aunt Deb's cheese balls are. We are not the most classy of gay brothers, but I feel that if we cleaned up our act we could have our own show on the Home Network. He would re-build houses while I drank wine and passed out in the lumber piles. I would be the comic relief and Nick would be the work. That's another thing Nick got that I didn't, work ethic.
The strangest thing about becoming an adult, is being an adult in the same room as the woman who birthed you. There is always that awkward transition that occurs when you realize that your parents are human beings, and while they may have made mistakes, they tried so hard it hurt. And then there is that moment when parents realize that you will do what you want, and that all they can impart to you is wisdom and not reprimand. Which is sort of fun, because this is the age in which you learn about your parents drug and alcohol abuse in addition to other stories that were inappropriate when they were more guardians than parents. For instance, I recently learned that after my mothers divorce with my father, she got stoned and robbed a mall.
As mothers day approaches, I'm getting scared that she'll hate my gift again, an agonizing anxiety I get at least twice a year. This year I got her Tina Fey's memoir, Bossy Pants. I read the first two chapters in at Borders and knew she'd love it. She still raves about Chelsea Handler's, "Are you there Vodka, it's me Chelsea." I think I finally made a safe choice and it dawned on me today that she doesn't care. She's been saying that for years, "I don't care what you get me, I just want you to remember." And then I remember.
I remember that hideous angel water fall sitting on her bed stand.
When my parents were still married it helped that my dad was able to bare some of the blame for forgetting these days of celebration, but it's been a long time since then and there has been a lot of apologies on my behalf. She always forgives me, but she has an otherworldly ability to not forget. It's like scientists shoved three elephant brains into her skull at birth, her enlarged cranium hidden beneath her bellowing Ferrah Fawcett waves. She still likes to remind me of the Christmas gift I gave her 15 years ago, four days after Christmas. I didn't know what to get her so I went to a christian book store and bought her a water fountain with a huge guardian angel pouring water out of a pail into a whimsical pit. Upon opening this late gift, my atheist mother looked like I had just punched her in the gut, because she held her stomach as she winced in pain. At first I thought she was so touched by my spiritual gift that she was about to cry, but that thought was quickly silenced when she started laughing like an exhausted goose, "what in the hell is this?" she shrieked. I remember feeling stupid, and I remember her seeing this in my eyes. She placed the angel water fall at her bed side and has reluctantly left it there ever since, taking it with her every time she moves.
I'd like to say that I learned my lesson in regards to getting my mother things she hates, but last year when I gave her a compost pit, she puked. "This whole going green thing is making me turn green!" she screamed in to the phone as she poked rotting food I had put in the plastic bin with a stick. "Get this thing the hell away from my house it smells and there are maggots, it's gross." Come to think of it, I'm just terrible at getting gifts for people. Kayla, Jen, and Rachelle can attest to this fact, as they happily did last week when over a few drinks painstakingly retold the stories of my bad gifts. "Last year, Ryan got me this awful picture of a a woman's hands with four inch nails poking an ice cream sunday," said Kayla. "For my birthday Ryan got me a stupid Oscar Wild book that was missing half the pages, have you read Oscar Wild, it's boring as fuck." I get it! I suck at this shit.
My brother Nick on the other hand is the master of gift giving. He always shows up to family gatherings with something for my mother, a new bottle of lotion here, a new piece of jewelry there; meanwhile I'm stuffing the organic tea bag I got her back into my pocket in shame. My mom though, loves us both the same. I've always been in awe of how much she loves us, and I've always under-loved her because I've never known how to replicate that immense of a love. Take for example the day I told her I was gay.
I had fallen in love with my first boyfriend Doug, who aside from cheating on me and telling me I could stand to loose a couple pounds, was a really great guy. When Doug broke up with me by letting me catch him cheating on me, I couldn't move. It was 6:30 am and I was shitting for the millionth time that morning, an emotional response shared by both my mother and I, practically every time we ever upset each other we have to take a break in arguing to take a dump. I came downstairs, where my mother was sitting on our couch and she said, "whats wrong baby, you don't poop that much if somethings not wrong," trying to cheer me up. At that, I lost it and began bawling in her arms, "Doug broke up with me!!!" I cried into her hair. "Are you telling me your gay?" She asked, pushing me away from her to look at my face. I nodded my head yes, and she pulled me so close to her I thought our skin cells were going to fuse together. "I'm so glad you finally told me."
Apparently she has known I was a nut gobbler since I was three and pretended to be Dorthy from The Wizard of Oz in her high heels and a wig made of tissues and blankeys. She told me she decided then to accept me for who I was. Again, I don't know how to love this woman in a outwardly reciprocal way, she has me outmatched. "At least Nick will be able to have kids, I still want grand babies" she would say often. A dream that was smashed when Nick announced that he too, was a raging homosexual. Unlike me, Nick actually surprised everyone with his gayness. Nick stands at almost six foot tall and is built like a tree trunk. Not fat, but like his arm bones are about as thick as a baseball bat. He is an emotional stone and physical wall, and displays a femininity possessed by the tangled pubic bushes of professional wrestlers. No one saw it coming, not even me.
"Well God dammit, I have two gay sons," said my mother, combing the hair from her face with her finger tips and swirling a glass of wine in the other hand. "This is going to take some getting used to." It took her about a week before she was more excited about us being gay than we were, her pride in us is un-silencing and forever present, even in moments when we behave like pre-maddona alcoholics at family gatherings. Last time Nick and I attended a family gathering, we got stoned in his car and laughed at the dinner table, trying to explain how funny my aunt Deb's cheese balls are. We are not the most classy of gay brothers, but I feel that if we cleaned up our act we could have our own show on the Home Network. He would re-build houses while I drank wine and passed out in the lumber piles. I would be the comic relief and Nick would be the work. That's another thing Nick got that I didn't, work ethic.
The strangest thing about becoming an adult, is being an adult in the same room as the woman who birthed you. There is always that awkward transition that occurs when you realize that your parents are human beings, and while they may have made mistakes, they tried so hard it hurt. And then there is that moment when parents realize that you will do what you want, and that all they can impart to you is wisdom and not reprimand. Which is sort of fun, because this is the age in which you learn about your parents drug and alcohol abuse in addition to other stories that were inappropriate when they were more guardians than parents. For instance, I recently learned that after my mothers divorce with my father, she got stoned and robbed a mall.
As mothers day approaches, I'm getting scared that she'll hate my gift again, an agonizing anxiety I get at least twice a year. This year I got her Tina Fey's memoir, Bossy Pants. I read the first two chapters in at Borders and knew she'd love it. She still raves about Chelsea Handler's, "Are you there Vodka, it's me Chelsea." I think I finally made a safe choice and it dawned on me today that she doesn't care. She's been saying that for years, "I don't care what you get me, I just want you to remember." And then I remember.
I remember that hideous angel water fall sitting on her bed stand.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
Don't breath.
I'm taking these probiotics lately to help combat the antibiotics I was on. The doctor explained it to me like this, "there is a war going on inside your tummy", she said rubbing her stomach with open palms and pouting her bottom lip, "the antibiotics are killing the bad guys and the good guys. Probiotics are good guys and you need to take them so the bad guys don't take over your body." At first I was insulted by her offensively unsophisticated and childlike metaphor but quickly realized that in addition to her hand movements, her good guy bad guy speech is the only reason I understand the necessity of probiotics. I even bought a probiotic drink to wash down the pills, an idea I'm now regretting, because it has a similar effect on the body as chasing a bottle of laxatives with battery acid. As a result in taking these probiotics, I've lost 4 pounds.
I've been wanting to loose 4 pounds for a while, not that I need to loose weight, if fact I might even be considered underweight. But the idea of loosing weight never looses it's luster when you are either, 1.) a recovering anorexic, or 2.) a single gay man. I am a disciplined guarantor of both 1 and 2. Being single now, I have become once more, irrevocably obsessive about my body weight, specifically the part of my stomach that gets bigger when I eat. I swear to God, I could eat a mustard seed and you could see it's bulge in my stomach, which I think means I'm skinny, but in my mind it makes me fat. Through this insecurity I have mastered the art of not breathing, or on the rare occasion that I do, my stomach does not elevate with the oxygen intake. I call this filter breathing because it mimics sponges who filter feed but never move. Take notes.
I am only comforted in my quest for an impossible body type that only a skewed mind can create, by the fact that most young gay men share this chase for intangible body mass. If you don't believe me, go to dinner with a bunch of queers, and listen to the self damnation and ridicule that spews out of their mouth every time something enters it. I once went on a date with a body-dysmorphic named Andy, who after dinner did push-ups against the hood of his car while I smoked two cigarettes and sucked in my stomach so hard I could have puked. Andy and I didn't work out.
I am at a coffee shop right now, I just ordered a tall cappuccino and sat down. Next to the register sits a full length mirror, which I was fixated on the entire time I waited on my coffee. In this mirror I caught myself not sucking in my gut, a mistake that was quickly corrected by me nestling my stomach against my spine. I looked around to see if anyone noticed that I had forgotten, for a moment, to suck my stomach in. Further, I looked around to see if anyone noticed the transformation of someone who was letting it all hang out to someone who was so self conscious that they nearly had a panic attack while waiting for a cappuccino. I have days like this often. Days when my ribs appear to be rolls. Days when I walk into a room and everyone is staring at my stomach and thinking to themselves how I could be more attractive if I lost a few more pounds. Rationally, I know I'm irrational in thinking this, but can't for the life of me use my rationale to convince myself that my rationality is irrational. This, is the mindset of an anorexic.
It makes me think of my days in middle school when I had to eat school lunch in the counselor's office. It had caught on to the entire staff at Westridge Middle School that I had stopped eating. I'm not sure if it was the 20 pounds I dropped in about a week, or the fact that I passed out in gym class during stretches on a regular basis, but it became painfully apparent that I had a massive eating disorder. There was only one picture taken of me during this time that spanned over a year. My mother took it. I'm sitting in a doctors office in Colorado, playing with blocks. My face is sunken in, the florescent light incapable of reaching the insides of my cheeks. My wrists were thin. When I look at this picture now, I wonder what my problem was, but as I look at myself in the mirror now, I know the problem never left. I just control it now.
My personal counselor was named Ms. Cunch. She is the one who made me eat my lunch in front of her every single day. She watched every bite, every chew, and every swallow, while I avoided eye contact and read her motivational posters plastered on her office walls. She never took her eyes off me for a second, trying anything and everything to get me to eat. Once, she actually pretended a spoon full of corn was an air plane and told me my mouth was the runway. "Ryan, the people in the plane are scared, they need to land before it crashes," she said while Kamikaze bombing my mouth with cold corn. She was only half joking when she said that, but I still couldn't help but feel slightly degraded.
After I was fed like a horse with a feeding bag attached to its face, I would be set free to my seminar class. This meant that I went straight to the downstairs bathroom where no one ever went, and stood in front of the full length mirror for my entire study hall. I would look at my body from every angle in the unflattering dim light refracting off of yellow wall tiles. I searched for even the slightest bit of imperfection, when I couldn't see any I would make them up, and blame Ms. Cunch for turning me into a water buffalo. I tried throwing up a few times, but as it turns out, middle school cafeteria food tastes even worse coming out as it does going in.
Ms. Cunch worked with me everyday for an entire school year, trying to help me love myself and trying to figure out why in the world at 90 pounds I thought I was a disgusting blob of bacon fat. I'm sure the cause for my body image was my deteriorating home life coupled with the normal self loathing existence of a homosexual eighth grader, but at the time I really thought I was a cow. Eventually I was told that if I got down to 80 pounds that I would have to be hospitalized and treated in the anorexia ward. I ate a bagel that day. Through years of therapy I started eating less like the Olson Twins and more like a normal teenager. I gained weight slowly until I got to a healthy body weight. But things like anorexia never leave a person, every day since then I still go into the bathroom after I eat and inspect my body, searching for imperfections.
I'm always searching for imperfections, in everything but mostly myself and I'm not sure why. I feel like I'm falling apart, sometimes I think I've been falling apart since birth. I look around at my family, friends, co-workers, and see that everyone is falling apart in some way, even if it's just the slow tattering of age.
Everyone is a harsh spectator of themselves and everyone is just as scared as I am. Perhaps it's not everyone. Perhaps it's just the people I surround myself with, But i don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say everyone. So while searching for imperfections in myself I also search for someone who isn't so scared so that I may achieve at least some stability. And while I rationally know that I am responsible for my own security, I can't seem to end it. I can't seem to end the search for someone to help me land.
Maybe Ms. Cunch was on to something. "Ryan, the people in the plane are scared, they need to land before it crashes."
I've been wanting to loose 4 pounds for a while, not that I need to loose weight, if fact I might even be considered underweight. But the idea of loosing weight never looses it's luster when you are either, 1.) a recovering anorexic, or 2.) a single gay man. I am a disciplined guarantor of both 1 and 2. Being single now, I have become once more, irrevocably obsessive about my body weight, specifically the part of my stomach that gets bigger when I eat. I swear to God, I could eat a mustard seed and you could see it's bulge in my stomach, which I think means I'm skinny, but in my mind it makes me fat. Through this insecurity I have mastered the art of not breathing, or on the rare occasion that I do, my stomach does not elevate with the oxygen intake. I call this filter breathing because it mimics sponges who filter feed but never move. Take notes.
I am only comforted in my quest for an impossible body type that only a skewed mind can create, by the fact that most young gay men share this chase for intangible body mass. If you don't believe me, go to dinner with a bunch of queers, and listen to the self damnation and ridicule that spews out of their mouth every time something enters it. I once went on a date with a body-dysmorphic named Andy, who after dinner did push-ups against the hood of his car while I smoked two cigarettes and sucked in my stomach so hard I could have puked. Andy and I didn't work out.
I am at a coffee shop right now, I just ordered a tall cappuccino and sat down. Next to the register sits a full length mirror, which I was fixated on the entire time I waited on my coffee. In this mirror I caught myself not sucking in my gut, a mistake that was quickly corrected by me nestling my stomach against my spine. I looked around to see if anyone noticed that I had forgotten, for a moment, to suck my stomach in. Further, I looked around to see if anyone noticed the transformation of someone who was letting it all hang out to someone who was so self conscious that they nearly had a panic attack while waiting for a cappuccino. I have days like this often. Days when my ribs appear to be rolls. Days when I walk into a room and everyone is staring at my stomach and thinking to themselves how I could be more attractive if I lost a few more pounds. Rationally, I know I'm irrational in thinking this, but can't for the life of me use my rationale to convince myself that my rationality is irrational. This, is the mindset of an anorexic.
It makes me think of my days in middle school when I had to eat school lunch in the counselor's office. It had caught on to the entire staff at Westridge Middle School that I had stopped eating. I'm not sure if it was the 20 pounds I dropped in about a week, or the fact that I passed out in gym class during stretches on a regular basis, but it became painfully apparent that I had a massive eating disorder. There was only one picture taken of me during this time that spanned over a year. My mother took it. I'm sitting in a doctors office in Colorado, playing with blocks. My face is sunken in, the florescent light incapable of reaching the insides of my cheeks. My wrists were thin. When I look at this picture now, I wonder what my problem was, but as I look at myself in the mirror now, I know the problem never left. I just control it now.
My personal counselor was named Ms. Cunch. She is the one who made me eat my lunch in front of her every single day. She watched every bite, every chew, and every swallow, while I avoided eye contact and read her motivational posters plastered on her office walls. She never took her eyes off me for a second, trying anything and everything to get me to eat. Once, she actually pretended a spoon full of corn was an air plane and told me my mouth was the runway. "Ryan, the people in the plane are scared, they need to land before it crashes," she said while Kamikaze bombing my mouth with cold corn. She was only half joking when she said that, but I still couldn't help but feel slightly degraded.
After I was fed like a horse with a feeding bag attached to its face, I would be set free to my seminar class. This meant that I went straight to the downstairs bathroom where no one ever went, and stood in front of the full length mirror for my entire study hall. I would look at my body from every angle in the unflattering dim light refracting off of yellow wall tiles. I searched for even the slightest bit of imperfection, when I couldn't see any I would make them up, and blame Ms. Cunch for turning me into a water buffalo. I tried throwing up a few times, but as it turns out, middle school cafeteria food tastes even worse coming out as it does going in.
Ms. Cunch worked with me everyday for an entire school year, trying to help me love myself and trying to figure out why in the world at 90 pounds I thought I was a disgusting blob of bacon fat. I'm sure the cause for my body image was my deteriorating home life coupled with the normal self loathing existence of a homosexual eighth grader, but at the time I really thought I was a cow. Eventually I was told that if I got down to 80 pounds that I would have to be hospitalized and treated in the anorexia ward. I ate a bagel that day. Through years of therapy I started eating less like the Olson Twins and more like a normal teenager. I gained weight slowly until I got to a healthy body weight. But things like anorexia never leave a person, every day since then I still go into the bathroom after I eat and inspect my body, searching for imperfections.
I'm always searching for imperfections, in everything but mostly myself and I'm not sure why. I feel like I'm falling apart, sometimes I think I've been falling apart since birth. I look around at my family, friends, co-workers, and see that everyone is falling apart in some way, even if it's just the slow tattering of age.
Everyone is a harsh spectator of themselves and everyone is just as scared as I am. Perhaps it's not everyone. Perhaps it's just the people I surround myself with, But i don't think it's too much of an overstatement to say everyone. So while searching for imperfections in myself I also search for someone who isn't so scared so that I may achieve at least some stability. And while I rationally know that I am responsible for my own security, I can't seem to end it. I can't seem to end the search for someone to help me land.
Maybe Ms. Cunch was on to something. "Ryan, the people in the plane are scared, they need to land before it crashes."
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Whats that?
Jen and I went to a gay bar for new years because we had no plans and we both desperately wanted to make out with someone when the clock hit midnight, but I think more than anything we had created a fantasy of meeting our future spouses. We ended up making out with each other, but I still managed to meet this man named Jet and within five minutes of our conversation we were sucking in helium and talking like mice, during which time I had already formulated the story we would tell our kids about how we met. “You should have seen daddy with that balloon in his mouth, he was so handsome. He sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks!” I don’t know why but in the event that I do ever have children, I see them enjoying a show with an annoying caliber parallel to Alvin and the Chipmunks, so I think my kids would enjoy my reference to their father sounding like their favorite television personalities. I didn’t really think we would get married and have kids, but it was just nice to pretend for a moment that something might work out, and that maybe I had met a gentleman. Before we departed, I sucked in the last bit of helium and asked him to make out with me. He didn’t, he just took my number and kissed me on the cheek, like a perfect gentleman.
He called me the next day and asked when my next day off was, I could barely contain my voice from reaching an obnoxious octave I was so excited. I told him Wednesday, and our date was set. We were to spend all day together, and there is no doubt in my mind that would have happened had I not taken him up on his invitation at 2:00 am, Tuesday night, to come over to his house for a “pajama party.” I knew when I read his invitation via face book messaging, that it was probably a booty call, but the fantasy husband I had made Jet out to be in my mind would never stoop to that level of sex, a level I have not been down to in years. The level people get to when they are lonely and horny and send a message to a stranger for a quick blow job or finger up the ass. No, Jet was a gentleman, he would never do that. But just to set some boundaries, I was sure to tell him that we would not be having sex, as I do not have sex with people that I don’t have feelings for, and he agreed to my terms and conditions.
When I pulled up to the address he gave me, I was greeted by valet parking, and escorted into the 10 story building on the plaza. Jet met me by the elevators, and we rode up in complete silence. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t talk over my loud intuition, which was telling me that this guy was not my future husband but just a rich guy I was probably going to hook up with.
When he opened the door to what I thought was going to be a nice apartment, my eye balls were sucked into my face and rocketed out of my ass hole, at the overwhelming sight of this mans 10th story penthouse. What wasn’t engulfed with marble, granet, stainless steel, or onyx was coated with an indescribable shimmer that can only be afforded by the rich and famous. “I’m home” I thought to myself. I felt like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” and Carrie Bradshaw with Big, I felt like a fucking princess who had been returned to the castle she was violently separated from at birth by her well intentioned yet inadvertently evil parents. Jet was leaning against a glass statue of an elephant looking at me. He stood 6”3’ but maybe a little taller on account of his Armani boots, his perfect jaw structure was grinding back and fourth, and his hair line, however reseeding, was overlooked in light of the 12 foot Thomas Kincaid painting hanging above and behind his head. He must have known I was week at my knees because at that moment, he made his move.
I was wearing a very ugly sweater that somehow looked only a little ugly on me and resembles something the late Mr. Rogers would have worn to a petting zoo before molesting every young boy able to take directions but not talk. Jet saw this as an in, and approached me slowly and with a sensual stride I have never seen exhibited in a man, and though it appeared to be rehearsed, I could feel the hair on my neck become erect. He unbuttoned the first wooden button to my sweater and sang, “So, let’s make the most of this beautiful day, since we’re together we might as well say,” he unbuttoned the second button, “Would you be mine, could you be mine.” At this point, he is singing so softly into my ear that at times his voice cracks and becomes an inaudible whisper. He unbuttoned the last button, “Wont you please, won’t you please. Please won’t you be my neighbor?”
I don’t know if it was the fact that I was being pressed against marble pillar that probably cost more than my student load debt, or the fact that this weird 26 year old just sang the Mr. Rogers theme song in my ear and was sucking on my neck like a lollypop, either way, my guard was not just down, it had been demolished. “What,” I thought to myself as my spine shivered at his mouth finding an untouched and dry portion of my neck, “could be wrong with this guy because something is not adding up.” And then, as if it were divine intervention, I saw the lines of cocaine on his granet table top. My guard was up again. It’s weird how quickly someone can tear down your guard, the only thing that protects your morality and self worth, but what’s even more fascinating is how fast a person can piece it back together at the fist sign of danger.
He saw me looking at the coke, “it’s just sugar for coffee” he said. Given the fact that I lived for 9 months in a cocaine den with a transexual porn star, I knew it was coke, but convinced myself that maybe it was sugar. I mean, lots of people dice their sugar into five perfectly symmetrical lines using credit cards to scoop it into their coffee cup right? “What do you do? How do you afford all of this?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked that question, it just felt appropriate. “I’m well kept, lets just say that,” he responded, giving me a look that commanded I not ask another question. “Oh so you’re mooching of your parents? You have a sugar daddy? You sell drugs and your body?” Still nothing. He would not tell me what he did for a living, which when coupled with the cocaine on the counter supplied ample indications that, maybe, I should count my losses and run . But then I caught a glimpse of his bathroom and further, his stone wall shower, and I decided that I was over reacting, that a little mystery is fun, and that I should just suck it up both literally and mentally.
I tend to do that a lot. Have a colossal red flag punching me in the face, I think this is called intuition, and act like I can’t feel the wind blowing my hair back with each wave of it’s leviathan fabric. Even as a child I ignored my keen sense of intuition and constantly found myself in trouble that could have been avoided had I listened to that voice saying things like, “Ryan, maybe you shouldn’t stick that fork in the electrical outlet,” or “perhaps you should wait five minutes before shoving that steaming hot casserole into your mouth.”
Take the time I almost died in my grandma’s pool for example; I must have been 10 or 11 years old, and it was November. She had covered her pool with a black plastic tarp that sagged down two feet and rested on top of the water. I remember taking into account the fact that the only thing keeping this flimsy plastic tarp from getting sucked into the pool was long rubber sacks of water laid on the edges around the pool. Still, I thought it could support my weight, not only did I think it could support my weight but I thought the thin layer of ice could too. I threw an acorn on the ice and it didn’t break through, so, against that voice that was screaming at me not to step on the ice, I did it anyway. There wasn’t even that moment where you’re standing on the ice, tapping it with your toe to see if it’s safe, I just fell right through. I was under a sheet of ice, getting wrapped up in cheep pool tarp plastic and thinking, “I’m going to die if I don’t’ get out of here.” I knew that if I kept moving it would make it worse so I sat still in the water until I floated up to the surface, I then slowly pulled myself towards the wall of the pool and carefully got out. I fixed the tarp and told my grandma I only fell in a little bit, because I didn’t want her to worry.
Jet gave me a silk robe to wear to bed. It took him about as much time as it took me to put it on that it did for him to rip it off of me. He kept trying to have sex, but I resisted. He was growing angry with me because I wouldn’t let him enter me, he even got up and went into the bathroom a few times to keep from yelling at me. My intuition was screaming for me to leave, but I was there and I needed him to calm down. I was scared, uncomfortable and lost. I gave him a blow job and somewhere between blowing a stranger in a silk robe at a top floor penthouse, and talking myself into staying the night, I began to realize some things about myself. For one, I realized the influence marble floors have on my pride and morality. Almost equally profound to the last realization, I became frighteningly aware of how scared I am, a fear that was revealed to me when I was drowning in his sheets thinking, “I’m going to die if I don’t get out of here.”
He called me the next day and asked when my next day off was, I could barely contain my voice from reaching an obnoxious octave I was so excited. I told him Wednesday, and our date was set. We were to spend all day together, and there is no doubt in my mind that would have happened had I not taken him up on his invitation at 2:00 am, Tuesday night, to come over to his house for a “pajama party.” I knew when I read his invitation via face book messaging, that it was probably a booty call, but the fantasy husband I had made Jet out to be in my mind would never stoop to that level of sex, a level I have not been down to in years. The level people get to when they are lonely and horny and send a message to a stranger for a quick blow job or finger up the ass. No, Jet was a gentleman, he would never do that. But just to set some boundaries, I was sure to tell him that we would not be having sex, as I do not have sex with people that I don’t have feelings for, and he agreed to my terms and conditions.
When I pulled up to the address he gave me, I was greeted by valet parking, and escorted into the 10 story building on the plaza. Jet met me by the elevators, and we rode up in complete silence. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t talk over my loud intuition, which was telling me that this guy was not my future husband but just a rich guy I was probably going to hook up with.
When he opened the door to what I thought was going to be a nice apartment, my eye balls were sucked into my face and rocketed out of my ass hole, at the overwhelming sight of this mans 10th story penthouse. What wasn’t engulfed with marble, granet, stainless steel, or onyx was coated with an indescribable shimmer that can only be afforded by the rich and famous. “I’m home” I thought to myself. I felt like Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman” and Carrie Bradshaw with Big, I felt like a fucking princess who had been returned to the castle she was violently separated from at birth by her well intentioned yet inadvertently evil parents. Jet was leaning against a glass statue of an elephant looking at me. He stood 6”3’ but maybe a little taller on account of his Armani boots, his perfect jaw structure was grinding back and fourth, and his hair line, however reseeding, was overlooked in light of the 12 foot Thomas Kincaid painting hanging above and behind his head. He must have known I was week at my knees because at that moment, he made his move.
I was wearing a very ugly sweater that somehow looked only a little ugly on me and resembles something the late Mr. Rogers would have worn to a petting zoo before molesting every young boy able to take directions but not talk. Jet saw this as an in, and approached me slowly and with a sensual stride I have never seen exhibited in a man, and though it appeared to be rehearsed, I could feel the hair on my neck become erect. He unbuttoned the first wooden button to my sweater and sang, “So, let’s make the most of this beautiful day, since we’re together we might as well say,” he unbuttoned the second button, “Would you be mine, could you be mine.” At this point, he is singing so softly into my ear that at times his voice cracks and becomes an inaudible whisper. He unbuttoned the last button, “Wont you please, won’t you please. Please won’t you be my neighbor?”
I don’t know if it was the fact that I was being pressed against marble pillar that probably cost more than my student load debt, or the fact that this weird 26 year old just sang the Mr. Rogers theme song in my ear and was sucking on my neck like a lollypop, either way, my guard was not just down, it had been demolished. “What,” I thought to myself as my spine shivered at his mouth finding an untouched and dry portion of my neck, “could be wrong with this guy because something is not adding up.” And then, as if it were divine intervention, I saw the lines of cocaine on his granet table top. My guard was up again. It’s weird how quickly someone can tear down your guard, the only thing that protects your morality and self worth, but what’s even more fascinating is how fast a person can piece it back together at the fist sign of danger.
He saw me looking at the coke, “it’s just sugar for coffee” he said. Given the fact that I lived for 9 months in a cocaine den with a transexual porn star, I knew it was coke, but convinced myself that maybe it was sugar. I mean, lots of people dice their sugar into five perfectly symmetrical lines using credit cards to scoop it into their coffee cup right? “What do you do? How do you afford all of this?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked that question, it just felt appropriate. “I’m well kept, lets just say that,” he responded, giving me a look that commanded I not ask another question. “Oh so you’re mooching of your parents? You have a sugar daddy? You sell drugs and your body?” Still nothing. He would not tell me what he did for a living, which when coupled with the cocaine on the counter supplied ample indications that, maybe, I should count my losses and run . But then I caught a glimpse of his bathroom and further, his stone wall shower, and I decided that I was over reacting, that a little mystery is fun, and that I should just suck it up both literally and mentally.
I tend to do that a lot. Have a colossal red flag punching me in the face, I think this is called intuition, and act like I can’t feel the wind blowing my hair back with each wave of it’s leviathan fabric. Even as a child I ignored my keen sense of intuition and constantly found myself in trouble that could have been avoided had I listened to that voice saying things like, “Ryan, maybe you shouldn’t stick that fork in the electrical outlet,” or “perhaps you should wait five minutes before shoving that steaming hot casserole into your mouth.”
Take the time I almost died in my grandma’s pool for example; I must have been 10 or 11 years old, and it was November. She had covered her pool with a black plastic tarp that sagged down two feet and rested on top of the water. I remember taking into account the fact that the only thing keeping this flimsy plastic tarp from getting sucked into the pool was long rubber sacks of water laid on the edges around the pool. Still, I thought it could support my weight, not only did I think it could support my weight but I thought the thin layer of ice could too. I threw an acorn on the ice and it didn’t break through, so, against that voice that was screaming at me not to step on the ice, I did it anyway. There wasn’t even that moment where you’re standing on the ice, tapping it with your toe to see if it’s safe, I just fell right through. I was under a sheet of ice, getting wrapped up in cheep pool tarp plastic and thinking, “I’m going to die if I don’t’ get out of here.” I knew that if I kept moving it would make it worse so I sat still in the water until I floated up to the surface, I then slowly pulled myself towards the wall of the pool and carefully got out. I fixed the tarp and told my grandma I only fell in a little bit, because I didn’t want her to worry.
Jet gave me a silk robe to wear to bed. It took him about as much time as it took me to put it on that it did for him to rip it off of me. He kept trying to have sex, but I resisted. He was growing angry with me because I wouldn’t let him enter me, he even got up and went into the bathroom a few times to keep from yelling at me. My intuition was screaming for me to leave, but I was there and I needed him to calm down. I was scared, uncomfortable and lost. I gave him a blow job and somewhere between blowing a stranger in a silk robe at a top floor penthouse, and talking myself into staying the night, I began to realize some things about myself. For one, I realized the influence marble floors have on my pride and morality. Almost equally profound to the last realization, I became frighteningly aware of how scared I am, a fear that was revealed to me when I was drowning in his sheets thinking, “I’m going to die if I don’t get out of here.”
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