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."   

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.   
       

      

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.
   

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.