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.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
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."
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