July 2004 Archives
I confess that for all my worldly, 34-years of hanging around, I'm still Wonder Bread. I'm an unexposed, sheltered white boy from the flatlands of Ohio and there really isn't too much that's not whitebread abotu me...except my hair. I have brotha / sista hair. It's dry, course, kinky-curly, and the bane of my existance. Since college, I've kept it short-short so I didn't have to deal with tha afro-qualities of it. Big hair just never fit into my self-image. Consequently, since there is very little I can do with my hair style-wise, it get's pretty much left alone.
But like a good sistah, I got myself to the beauty parlor today and got a relaxer treatment which I hadn't done for years and years. Nothing like a pale white boy getting the funk down because he has sucky hair.
So I snap this pic tonight and realize that while the hair doesn't really look all that different, it does hae a certain, Superman-like quality to it. So I'm keeping it for a while.
As I've mentioned, I'm playing a lot of City of Heroes, especially with this week off of school. I've almost completely given up TV and Tivo to concentrate on this very important matter so I thought I'd share my current pantheon of heroes. It's obvious the strong queer sensibility running through the lot; the women all have thigh-high, kick-ass heels and the guys are buff and shirtless. Don't dwell on the redundant obviousness of it all and don't mention the obvious rip-offs of other established comic characters; I'm fully aware of my limited imagination in these matters but then again, it's all just a game and quite possibly a Saturday morning cartoon if I can sell them right. Castro Clone, Semirrhage, GoodFellow RN, The Murmuration, Hesphaetus, Mogheien,Lady Bliss, Catnip, Fury 6, Brainiac 12, and of COURSE, Ms. Brittany Spearz.
As it was pointed out to me yesterday via email from a perpetual humpy-crush of mine, the picture of me on the tractor only highlighted what I'd been secretly thinking: I looked like I had a pair of man-boobs working under that t-shirt as I was riding the mower. I actually thought I looked like I weighed something close to a circus elephant but I didn't want to get all dramatic and faggy about it...until someone else pointed it out. That's typically when I squeal and cry. So to certify I'm not quite to man-boob proportions yet, I'm revising the header picture. I'm totally that vain and shallow, if it couldn't be guessed.
Yes, that's me in the header pic mowing grass on Little Red last night. I hate Little Red, not because it cuts my mowing time from an hour and something down to just under 25 minutes, but rather because I'm so consistantly dissatisfied with the cut of the mow (uneven) and the undistributed clumps of thatch that I have to rake afterwards (as IF, Mary), that I'd just as soon go back to my faithful push-mower with its elegant, parallel, perfectly straight cutting pattern. Unfortunately, as I said, it cuts the mow-time down considerably which you can't hardly argue.
That being said, as I'm alone this weekend with Jeff out of town, I'm going to sneak out again tomorrow and push mow it because I'm neurotic enough to be unable to stop thinking about how much I hate the cut. Diagnosis: Verdant Lawn Neurosis. They can't even begin to think of how to make meds for this.
We have a routine, Jeff and I, on Friday nights for the commute up from the city, back to our home along the river. We stop in Middletown, appropriately about a half-way point between us and the city, and do our homo shopping at Lowe’s and Wal-Mart, sometimes venturing to Bed, Bath, & Beyond and the Rag Shop. Then we typically treat ourselves to some fine dining at Wendy’s and head home, truck stuffed with more crap we don’t really need but we’re happy and that’s a good way to end a week and start a weekend. On the off chance we’re tired of Wendy’s, there is a Burger King at the second exit for Middletown (a two-exit town? I know….we’re progressive that way) but on our last occasion to visit there, their utter lack of anything resembling service pissed us both off enough to absolutely swear them off. Forever. And that’s serious.
“Fuckers. We’re never going in there again,” we ranted.
“Never. Ever. Again….and we MEAN it,” we continued.
And so it’s been for the last few months, that we’ll bypass that particular BK with all their shitty service and lazy wait staff , and go directly to Wendy’s or the comic-book store which happens to be close. It’s been working out fine for us in all respects and somewhere, deep in our hearts, we feel our lack of patronage of that Burger King will ultimately contribute to the demise of the franchise and we’ll be vindicated.
Tonight, on the way home, we did our Middletown circuit and stopped for some Wendy’s Biggy Sized Number 2’s but by the time we got on the highway for the last 45-minutes of the ride home, Jeff was shifting uncomfortably and I knew what it was. Let’s say Jeff’s stomach doesn’t do grease well. At all. In fact, we call it, for lack of a better term….um….explosive diarrhea. We’re often lucky to get a warning salvo that means we better find some facilities, pronto. Of course being caught between exit 3 and 4 on I-84 presents its own unique coordination problems. Except tonight.
“Get off on Exit 3. I’m going to go shit at that fucking Burger King we hate.”
“Good idea. In fact, don’t even use the toilet…just blow it over the stall. Show them what bad customer service is all about,” I said. I have a thing about customer service, as in, I expect it. Don’t fuck me over with shitty customer service or I’ll get shitty all over you right back…or at the very least, import someone who can. Literally.
So I dropped him off and zipped over to the comic store to pick up the new issue of the JLA mini-series, Identity Crisis, and drove back to get him.
When he got back in car, paler and lighter, to be sure, I inquired as to the appropriateness of stopping at the Hated BK.
“This was TOTALLY the right thing to do,” he said. Not only do I feel better, but I feel better. Which really, what more can you ask?
I have worshipped in the House of Bentkid. There was a miraculous appearance of Tyler this morning in NYC...it was all Madonna statuaries shedding tears of blood, Christ-like apparitions appearing in smeared storefront windows, a rain of frogs, and spontaneous generation of fragrant undergrowth where he stood.
AND we traded various blogger jealousy rants which is standard fare when Blogs collide. Fucking AWESOME.
As I've been doing for the past several evenings, I work on projects and papers for my law class I'm currently taking and then play a little online "City of Heroes" to decompress before bedtime. I've been working on my healing character, GoodFellow RN, for a bit and have him to a point where he's being invited to join temporary teams to go wail on the Evil and do some major damage to the sewer zombies.
So last night as I'm playing on this team of five others, we're rocking along, taking orders from the leader, Jean Greene (an obvious knock-off of Jean Gray from the X-Men), and she's so bossy but in a way that shows she knows what she's doing so it's ok. For my part, I'm so inexperienced and unfamiliar with playing video games that I just press the fire buttons rapidly, hoping to just hit whatever is standing in front of me. It's a working strategy that so far, no one has complained yet. As the team healer, a Dr. McCoy, of sorts, it's my job just to keep blasting out healing aura's which add damage resistance to everyone around me. Sounds impressive but looks like I'm ripping a HUGE fart that ripples out in all the neon-green splendor you can imagine. It's not subtle.
So as were heading deeper and deeper into the bowels of the sewer, kicking ass this way and that, Jean suddenly stops and says, "I have to take off, my dad is yelling at me to get off the computer and do my homework," and for the first time, I realized I wasn't playing with other 34-year olds sitting at home, marinating in their pathetic, wasting lives; I'm playing with TEENAGERS who are trying to get out of doing their seventh-grade book reports on "Catcher in the Rye".
So not exactly a confidence boost, I'm thinking. AND I've wasted the subtle queer undercurrents of my hero and his fahizzle-shizzle costume on know-nothings at best and probably future fag-bashers at worst.
How any fan of super-heroes or comics could not run out and buy "City of Heroes" video game is beyond me. Of course I don't have hours to waste farting around designing costumes and making up powers only to turn my hero or heroine loose on a cruel and unsuspecting, yet someone dirty and villianous city. But I took some liberty this weekend since it was Independence Day and did just that. My current hero is a level 5 ASS KICKER.
The fact that he's also a fully realized fantasy come to Gay Life is nothing short of remarkable. I give you, Castro Clone. And lest you think that it's all flying around and working sleepless hours to keep the strees of Paragon City cleaned up, there is definitely time for an open-air gay dance bar. How we got Aquaman and some hottie from Scotland there, I'll never know.
I'm so seriously wrong, wrong, wrong but I'm loving it.
