Two Random Thoughts (Plus a Clarification)

1) It is strange to me that I’m moving from my little house to another little house in just a few days. I quite like this little house and it’s location and I’m sad to be leaving it for what is also a quite nice little house in almost as good a location, but it’s more than that. For my last years in New York, ever since the moment I hauled the last of my post relationship divided things out of the Sackett Street apartment, I didn’t really have a home. I had a place where I slept most nights and where I kept my stuff, but it wasn’t a home. Part of that is my own psychological investment in the word, but it’s also about comfort in space, about longing for a specific corner of a specific room and a specific chair when I’m away from it. For a time, that absence wasn’t a problem because my investment in the notion of home resided inside another person and where ever she was equaled home. But, that ended. And the disconnect between the place where my stuff lived and the notion of home was one of the things that drove me from New York.

And I’ve found a home in this space. Yes, a lot of it is the town. And, yes, a whole lot of it has to do with my psychological investment in the word. But I genuinely enjoy coming back to my rooms, to whatever mess I’ve left behind and to the dog waiting on me. I’ve never lived alone before, and I like that too. Rationally, none of this will change. But I’m still bummed about the moving.

2) No novelist, no matter how talented that person might be, can get away with using the word “cunt” in non dialogue situations, to describe something related to a sex act, more than once in 100 pages. Now, I’m no prude and I’m certainly not a member of the PC language police. In certain rare situations, I’ve even been known to voice the word in question. But, note that it is a spoken word.

Now, I will grant the objection that there really is no good word in the English language to describe that particular bit of anatomy, especially when trying to render the condition of sexual arousal. Veer in one direction and you risk coming across as a clinical observer of human beings rather than someone who actually has experienced life and attempted to understand it. Veer too far in another and you run the risk of, well, being mistaken for someone who is discussing house pets who have been left too long in the rain. Veer in a third, and you’re in Harlequin Romance territory where everything is throbbing and moist.

Still, there is something to be said for subtlety and oblique description. So, here is my newest rule for fiction: In a certain kind of novel, for every 100 pages, a novelist gets one pass for one “cunt” in a sex scene involving a woman character. If another sex scene, ahem, arises prior to the 100 page mark, it is the novelist’s duty to find another method of description.

I can, I suppose, grant a first person narrator exception to this rule, but do not expect me to read the book as I prefer a certain sort of eloquence in my first person narrators that is generally precluded by more than one sexually related “cunt” in less than the space of 100 pages.

And, no, there is no Henry Miller exception here. It wasn’t hot when he did it either.

Finally, for the literally one of you who has emailed, there will be another, final installment of the Ballad of Little Red. When I started, I really wanted to use Longfellow’s “The red coats are coming!” as the jumping off point for, “The chicken is shitting!” except it turns out that Longfellow never actually wrote, “The red coats are coming!” and the rhyme scheme in that poem is a total bitch. But chicken shit bingo rocks and anyone who comes to visit me needs to make sure the stay includes a Sunday afternoon because we are totally playing.

The Midafternoon Ride of Lil' Red

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the afternoon spent with Lil’ Red
One steamy Sunday in ought five,
Hardly a man is still able to drive
Who drank Shiner with a chicken well fed.

Bill said to his friend, “If the chicken march,
From corner to corner of the coop today,
Hoist a Shiner aloft in Little Longhorn’s sober arch
As Dale plays minor chords and frat boys make hay
One if by nature or two if by Ginny’s cue poke
And I on table side will gawk as if yoked,
Drinking cold beer and cheering along
As Red pecks in circles and Dale sings his songs,
It’s chicken shit bingo and man is it wrong.

We had said, “Let’s Go!” and climbed in the car,
To Ginny’s Little Longhorn, belly up to the bar.
As thunder rolled in and the hotdogs were free
Dollar fifty Lonestars and baby dykes in sacuy tees.
Lil’ Red out back waited forlorn
His time would come, for now he pecked corn.
They say he wakes eager on Sunday morn.
He walks there in cicrles, his plumage a ruffle,
Inside excitement impossible to muffle.

Meanwhile beer drunk quickly and cold
It’s hard to get refills, the crowd’s growing tight
People jostle in boots and big hats, could this be a fight?
But hipsters and cowboys and Walmart chic all settle down
The chicken is coming, read clearly the signs,
A hush over the room, two dollars a chance, form a neat line.
Inching forward, bills clutched in anxious hand
52 numbers, a line and a cross, 54 chances, one per man.
Getting your ticket, you scan the board’s fares
Numbers are random; border or internal squares?
A moment of peace now as Ginny scatters feed a bit
Here comes the chicken! It’s time for some shit.

To be con't...

I'm A Chicken Shit Winner

Details to follow. Photo courtesy of L.

Today’s Thing That Is Making Me Totally Irrationally Angry

It’s probably because I just read it four times in five pages of student work, but “alright” is not a word, even if your spell check tells you it is. Oh, sure, it’s now called “non-standard usage” by the dictionaries, but that’s just another example of mental laziness and ignorance becoming the dominating force in our lives.

Sadly, I’m serious about this. The acceptance of "alright" is someplace on the slippery slope that has created a nation full of mouth breathing dullards who still believe in Weapons of Mass Destruction and are willing to base their entire political and social constructs around something that, if it came from another culture, we'd call a creation myth.

And, the first person who writes, “It’ll be alright” in the comments gets a beat down the next time we run into one another.

Ah. Three out of four from the Sox in Fenway. That's a good weekend.

Today’s reason I do not love Austin, TX

Distance.

I posted here a few months ago about my cousin Tim’s battle with ALS. Tonight, I got phone calls from my sister and mother, and he’s failing fast.

There are few people who can understand how important my extended family is to me. Of the people who come to this site, Asia is one who has seen it first hand. They are not people I would normally choose as friends, but they are good and caring and would do anything to help me if they could possibly do it.

And now, my cousin’s husband is dying and I’m several thousand miles away. And, I don’t want to be. Tim and Sandy are remarkable people; they had their first child while Sandy was still an undergraduate and their second soon after. Neither was “planned,” but they’ve managed to raise two amazing, caring young men under adverse circumstances. When their youngest left home for college, they were in their early 40s and I remember them talking about how much time they had left to live as a couple. The obvious depth of their love and their devotion is something that has amazed and motivated me. They are two people who’ve found partners and have fashioned lives together. I admire them more than they can possibly know.

Tonight, family and friends held a benefit dinner to offset some of Tim’s medical care. People came in from all over the country to show how much they cared for Tim. He’s now unable to speak and barely able to swallow, but he’s mobile and, in the cruel twist of this disease, his brain is sharp as it ever was.

He wrote a speech that he was unable to deliver, and his eldest son read it for him. When he managed to choke something out to my mother, he told her he was a “lucky man.” This is a night I should’ve been beside my family and not in Texas and it kills me to be so far away.

Because of a quirk of Catholicism, my youngest first cousin is ten years older than me. Consequently, when I was entering my teen years, they were all entering their early twenties. They were clearly adults, but they were also far cooler than any adults I knew and they seemed to take me seriously. They also spent a lot of time in the summers taking me to places like water slides. For the boys, I know now that part of the attraction was that a tow headed kid who looked a few years younger than he was is a babe magnet. But, mostly, they did it because they loved me. When their kids were younger and I was just starting to drive, I did the same thing. Sure, I knew that my scrawny seventeen year old self was more appealing to the seventeen year old ladies with a couple of amazingly cute 7 and 8 year old kids in my care, but I took them to the water slide because it had been done for me and it was a memory that shined.

Big Tim was, no is, larger than life. And there has never been a second of doubt in my mind from the moment he started showing up at family events when he was about seventeen, that he would play with me, that he would, later, buy me beer, or that he would chase a bully away if I needed it done. Now, he’s got a bully on his back that I can’t, for a second, understand. And, it’s a bully I can’t chase away. But I should’ve been there tonight to show him that I’ve got his back, because, if I’d asked, he would’ve had mine.

You'll have to trust me on this.

When it seems to have reached a conclusion, have faith in your mouse. Thanks to Red Headed Andy for passing on the link.

Bring Me Some Figgy Pudding

The figs on my tree are starting to get ripe...



And, just in time. In a very un-Austin like move, my landlord is jacking my rent up quite a lot and I have to move. My landlord is crazier than a sack full of cats, and when she would only give me a six month lease, I wrote it off as part of her wackiness. But she may have had a plan all along.



However, my friend Sue, basically the only person I knew when I moved here, is moving to New Orleans to start a new job. And I'm going to take her little house. Which is cheaper than mine now, has a washer/dryer, a big yard and a little patio, and a creek. The location is only slightly less good than the one I'm in now--I'll be doing a touch more driving--and the house is smaller. But, really, how much space do Lucy and I need? And her landlord is this old Texas guy, the lease is handwritten and to the point: "Renter will pay me $550 a month and renter will not do hard drugs on premises."



Oh, and the back gate unlocks onto a dog park.

The Posting in Which I Reference Stereotypes

Okay, I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but the Hon. A is something, for lack of a better phrase, of a Fag Hag. Pretty much all her close friends are gay men, most of them in their late 30s to early 40s and incredibly nice, if a tad more, well queenish, than one is used to if one has lived in New York for a long time. I suspect that has something to do with breaking free from a place whose bigotry I can barely comprehend and living in a state where the Governor recently suggested that all gay people should leave should they want to live in a place where people who aren’t straight are treated with common decency and dignity. But I digress.

Last night, she took me to dinner at this couple’s house. I’ve decide to call them M&M because they have the same name and they’re both so sweet they should have a chocolate candy shell.

They also have the WORST taste I’ve ever seen. Seriously. Walking into their house was like walking into my Grandmother’s house if she’d had more money than sense, a fetish for really bad art centered around lurid colors and religious iconography and a serious South Western Chic jones.

And that’s before the clutter. The whole fucking place was full of stuff. I realize that I’ve morphed into something of a minimalist and that when I win the lottery and buy my dream house, I’m going furniture shopping with Wes, but this place was like a flea market stall filled with all the ugly crap one could possibly imagine. The only plus was that the couch wasn’t coated in plastic.

And did I mention the lurid colors and the geometric patterns of the South West theme? My retinas feel burned.

Seriously though, what’s the world coming to when a couple of well educated, middle aged gay men with money can buy a fabulous art deco bungalow and then furnish it like a whorehouse? Without a trace of irony?

So, my Mom has a new puppy. That much cuteness should not be allowed.

To fall in love is easy, even to remain in it is not difficult; our human loneliness is cause enough. But it is a hard quest worth making to find a comrade through whose steady presence, one becomes steadily the person one desires to be. -Anna Louise Strong

Lord, I hope so. I’ve been terrible about this thing, but I am aware of it. I’m starting a new job and life has been a bit hectic. But I’m about to go get a sandwich and an Imperial Dr. Pepper (with REAL SUGAR!), so I’ve got that to look forward to.