Stormy Weather

It's hotter'n hell here in the east. It has been since last Saturday and it shows every intention of staying this way for another day or two.

Up above is a shot of the crowds at Robert Moses State Park, on Long Island, over the weekend.

I had a sort of date Saturday night with a guy in my 12-Step program whom I've been interested in for years (he's taller than me!!) and he's been sober for about 27 years now. However, we had a chaperone, a fellow who is new to the area and was looking for something to do Saturday night, so he invited himself along with us.

We had dinner first and then went to see and hear the New Jersey Gay Men's Chorus perform up north in the state. It was broiling in the church where they were performing. But that didn't matter. They performed with brio, sensitivity and a real feeling for the material. They even managed to find a mezzo to perform with them (a REAL lady). Their rendition of the Habanera from Bizet's "Carmen" was breathtaking and they captured the flavor of a group of [straight] men enthralled by the gypsy cigarette girl who ruins men's lives, Carmen. The melody of the chorus is absolutely haunting and even though I'm not an opera queen, it is one of my favorite arias.

We didn't get home until way past midnight. Not that it mattered. It was still over 80 degrees in central New Jersey at that hour. I cranked up the a/c in my bedroom, and slept under a sheet. And nothing else.

That's the "weather" part of the subject of today's post. The "stormy" part starts now.

I had an e-mail today from an old friend of mine. He informed me that he'd gotten a phone call over the weekend from another friend of ours, "S", informing him that the "S's" lover, "H", a man we've known for many decades, has been sent home from the hospital to die of pancreatic cancer.

My emotions are all over the place. I first met "H" in Seattle in the summer of 1977, right after I broke up with my lover number 2. "H" and I quickly became drinking and disco-dancing buddies and were pretty inseparable every Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons for the next 9 months or so... until I moved to New York in the spring of 1978.

Eventually "H" moved to New York too where we rekindled our friendship. "H" acquired the boyfriend who called us over the weekend and, in time, we all settled down in various domestic partnerships. Eventually "H" and "S" moved back to Seattle where "H" finished his degrees, eventually getting a doctorate. After that he became a college professor, first in Texas and later in Connecticut.

When I broke up with my partner of 15 years, in the summer and fall of 1994, S&H had long since moved away and, by the time they moved back to the northeast, I was at my bottom in central New Jersey and they, by default, remained friends with my ex.

I have to admit that I've always had a touch of resentment about that, since my ex wouldn't have known any of these people if it hadn't been for me. My ex wasn't terribly lovable and was woefully lacking in certain social skills.

Anyway, that's all water over the dam now. Now my friend is dying and I want him to know that I love him, that even though we haven't been a part of each other's lives for many years now, I have always loved him and I will miss him terribly when he is gone.

Life is short, people. Real short. Go do something you've been meaning to do but have kept putting off. You never know.

Gastric Bypass - Part Trois

But first... a message about Broadway! This piece, produced by Tony-Chasing wunderkind Cubby Bernstein (http://www.cubbybernstein.com/), takes place in the dressing room of "Xanadu" star Cheyenne Jackson. It's a fierce, hot, tranny mess! Enjoy!



And be sure to watch this year's Tony broadcast on CBS, Sunday, June 15, 2008 starting at 8:00 p.m. (EDT)

Now, about yesterday. Another day off visiting doctors. 9:00 a.m. with the surgeon. Actually with his nurse. I'm good to go. I'm scheduled for surgery on Monday, August 11th. In the afternoon I saw the shrink who grilled me for 45 minutes about my addiction(s), recovery, past, present and hopes for the future.

Net-net, he's happy to sign off for the insurance company and attest to the fact that I'm doing this for all the right reasons.

This leaves me with another visit to the nutritionist, an office visit with a gastroenterologist followed a week later by an upper-sigmoidoscopy, lab work for the hospital, one final consult with the surgeon and then, finally, I'll be good to go.

Now I can almost enjoy my summer vacation.

Have a great weekend everyone! Love to Aunt Lou and Uncle Fred and all the cousins!

JoyZeeBoy

Flabbergasted!

I really shouldn't be surprised, but I am.

It is so abundantly clear to me now exactly what sort of political machines Hillary and Bill Clinton are. Apparently the deal (with the devil and with each other) decades ago, when they first met, was that Bill would get to be president first and Hill would get her shot at it second.

And she is NOT about to call it quits. Not without taking somebody prisoner. Like the candidate presumptive.

I guess she really thinks that she's going to bargain with him from a position of strength. For what? The Vice-Presidency? Probably. She'd make a shitty Supreme Court Justice. She's way too polarizing and way too flammable for that. But to allow her, and that skirt-chasing bum husband of hers, to sit at the table of power.... again... would be unconscionable.

I feel it in my gut. If she became vice-president she would spend 4 years looking for ways to subtly sabotage President Obama's chances for re-election, so that she could snatch the office away from him. I believe she's just that desperate.

Now, to give her her due, she has clearly broken through the glass ceiling to the White House. In future elections it simply won't be important what the sex or color of the candidates are. The Democratic Party has done this, not the Republican Party (the party of Lincoln, as they love to point out).

But I hope that Senator Obama has the sense to realize that, rather than being an asset, she would be a toxic presence in his administration.

Other than that, he could select the Jackass as his running mate, and I'd still vote for him.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehn, now get the F* out of here!

Okay, it's official. Hillary is now the creature that will not die. Most of us were kind of banking on and hoping that tonight, at her "press conference" here in New York, she would graciously throw in the towel and offer her support to Barry.

But, nooooooooooooa. According to the latest reports, her spokesperson (and all round nut job) Terry McAuliffe, is saying that she will NOT bow out tonight, leaving open the probability that she's still horse-trading with the Obama people for a Supreme Court nomination and the total assumption of her leftover campaign debt in exchange for her gracefully throwing in the towel sometime later in the week.

Under NO circumstances should Barack offer Hillary the Vice-Presidency.

Anything that keeps her away from the presidency at this point will be okay in my book. I'm afraid that I've started to side with the pundits (including the author of the anti-Bill article in this month's Vanity Fair - and the spouse of former Clinton White House Spokesperson, Dee Dee Myers - Todd Purdham) who think that the farther away from the White House we can keep the Clintons, the better off the nation will be.

Hill and Bill are too enamored of power. Not only that but they're starting to act and sound like the Bush's, and acting as though they are ENTITLED to occupy positions of power; that the nation owes them something.

Nobody in Washington, from the top down or the bottom up, is "entitled" to anything in terms of an elected office. All elected officials serve at the discretion of the electorate. This is a dictatorship of the proletariat, in it's purest sense of the words. When we tossed George III out on his royal ass it was with the understanding that with him went the ancient idea of some sort of "divine right" of Kings or Princes or Presidents or Senators or Representatives.

The People Rule and the People Reign (as much as Dick Cheney might like to disagree).

When President Obama is sworn in next January, I hope he keeps that in mind.

And the Clintons can join Dubya down in Texas for some good old-fashioned, shit-kickin', crow eatin'.

I won't miss any of the crazy-assed, power-hungry, mofos.

Summer Lovin'

I couldn't resist putting that in, above. I love bubble-gummy, brain-dead pop tunes from every decade. Yes, it's Sheena Easton doing "Morning Train."

But this is serious. It's time for me to put together my annual "play list" of beach music for our upcoming week-long jaunt to Wildwood, New Jersey.

A moment's explanation. Wildwood is tightly wound up with my childhood. My grandmother took me there for the Feast of the Assumption every year (August 15), starting when I was about 8 or 9 and continuing until I was 13. She liked to soak her feet in the ocean on the Feast Day of the Virgin's Bodily Assumption into Heaven (look, if you're not Catholic, you're not going to understand any of this, so just move along.)

It was the late 50's and early 60's. Those days of "Wildwood Nights" (by Bobby Rydell). The boardwalk was one of the largest in the world. There were amusement piers all along it's length, in addition to game arcades, rides and tons of beach food establishments selling Philly cheesesteaks, candy apples, cotton candy, Fralinger's Salt Water Taffy and all of it washed down with genuine "Frank's" ginger ale.

It was paradise to a 10 year old. And a buck or two would last the night.

Besides, Wildwood was where all the "cool kids" who appeared daily on American Bandstand, when it was still in Philadelphia, came for the summer. They all had summer jobs working those arcade games, rides and short-order cooking at those fast food joints.

I haven't been there since the summer I turned 14. 1962. I remember the year because rather than doing "kid stuff" that summer, I couldn't wait to see "Lawrence of Arabia" which was playing at a theater on the boardwalk. I was officially too grown up to be at the beach with my Nana. It was no longer seemly for an older woman, clearly not my mother, to be escorting me around town -- and vice versa.

Anyway, after many decades my college buddies and I decided to try for Wildwood this year after two years of Cape Cod and eons of summers at the Delaware shore before that.

So I decided to put together a play list of songs which I can download to my MP3 player and plug into my portable stereo for playing at the beach this summer.

This is what I've come up with so far:

Title .................................Artist
Heat Wave...................... Martha & the Vandellas
Under the Boardwalk .. The Drifters
Wipe Out........................ The Surfaris
Good Vibrations............ Beach Boys
Surfin’ USA ....................Beach Boys
California Girls ..............Beach Boys
Satisfaction ....................Rolling Stones
Summer in the City ......Lovin’ Spoonful
Happy Together ...........The Turtles
Summer Wind ...............Frank Sinatra
Up On The Roof ...........The Drifters
Wildwood Days .............Bobby Rydell
Kokomo .........................Beach Boys
Telstar ..........................The Ventures
Octopus’s Garden .......The Beatles
Walkin’ on Sunshine ....Katrina and The Waves
Glad All Over ................Dave Clark Five

If anybody has any suggestions for other "summer-beach" type pop tunes over 20 years old, please feel free to post 'em. I'm all ears.

Lost (and Found)

Bedtime around my place on weeknights is laughably early, usually around 9:30-9:45 p.m. People say it puts a crimp in my social life which would be true if I actually had a social life. But I don't.

It hasn't been easy, being a fan of "Lost" this season, what with it's 9:00 p.m. start time. Still, I managed to stay up on Thursdays until the gawd-awful hour of 10:00 p.m. to watch every episode.

Except last night, for the big season 4, 2-hour finale. So I dutifully set the vcr and started recording the show as soon as it came on, so I could re-watch the entire thing over the weekend (tomorrow is supposed to be crappy here in the east - great TV weather).

I was looking forward to savoring all of the big "revelations" that would be forthcoming in the course of the show.

When I got to work this morning, though, the office was abuzz with yak about the show. I tried, I really, really tried, to ignore the talk, to blot out the spoilers, to not hear that it's Locke in the coffin and yes, the island did move (sort of) and that all kinds of threads got wrapped up (sort of).

All day long I've been inundated, both at work and on the internets, by talk of the "secrets and spoilers" of last night's double-episode.

I feel like my brain has been metaphorically "flossed."

But I'll still watch it. What other choice do I have? What other choice do ANY of us have??!!

==================================================
Friday Catfight: "When Queens Collide"

My friend Rob Byrnes (Famous Author Rob Byrnes) dug up this little nugget about LGBT blog accreditation for the upcoming Democratic National Convention.

Click here to watch the fur fly.

Thursday Melange

FYI, I stopped at Staples on my way home last night and bought their housebrand model "M-3" shredder which is a desktop model. Granted, I have to empty the container far more regularly than I did with the old Xerox model, but (and this is the real selling point for this particular machine) you can feed it unopened sales envelopes and it'll chomp right through 'em, even if they have one of those ersatz "credit cards" glued to one of the pages inside.

I even got it for the web-page price, $59.99, instead of the store price of $79.99. All in all, I'm very pleased with it. It's black plastic with sort of brushed aluminum accents. It looks nice on my kitchen countertop, in between the toaster and the microwave, both of which it matches. TOTALLY important for a gay man!

Now, about today. All of my personal problems are pretty high-class today (Gucci Problems), so I'm just going to pass along some headlines (and the webpages they are ripped from) for today.

Let's start with show-biz.

Gayken is Preggers. Yes, Clay Aiken is allegedly having a baby with some record producer (via artificial insemination, of course). It's only a matter of time before he buys Wonderland Ranch and starts having his skin bleached. Read about it

Here.

Then be sure to check out these photos of the Decider Guy in Chief, or whatever the fuck he calls himself these days (I call him Dipshit!), bumping pussies with an Air Force Academy Graduate and soon to be useless cannon-fodder in a pointless and unwinnable war:

Here.

Finally, if you haven't had enough yuks for the day, be sure to check out the New York Times editorial staff's opinion of Scott McClellan's new inside-the-White-House "if you sleep with the Devil be prepared to be royally fucked" tell-all,

Here.

Maybe I'll have something to yak about tomorrow.

Shredding Documents

No, I'm not talking about what's going on in DC these days, as it usually does in the closing days of all administrations.

I'm talking about how I spent a lot of my weekend.

Sometimes... a lot of times... I can be a real pack rat. It's easier to toss things on the kitchen table, or counter, or in a drawer, than to deal with it "right now." Not bills, of course. I gave that up when I got sober. Those get paid right away.

But other things I think I "might" be interested in sometime... well... later.

Such as fliers from various theater companies in New York. I get inundated with those. Somebody put my name on a mailing list years ago and now I'm the darling of every producing group from The Public Theater to the Roundabout to the Manhattan Theater Club. If I had subscriptions to all of those I'd never spend a night at home for 9 months of the year.

But rather than just tossing them, something inside me says "take a look at this later... you might be interested." and it winds up gathering dust on a counter top for anywhere from a week to several decades.

Because I had an extended holiday weekend due to my medical appointments yesterday, and because gas has gotten so prohibitively expensive, I decided to spend a couple of hours a day going through all the crap that's accumulated over the last 7 years I've lived where I am now and to toss anything that was generic in nature and to shred anything that had my name printed on it. Oh, and to shred any documents older than my heart surgery.

Things were going great on Saturday and Sunday but by Monday morning my old Xerox wastepaper-basket sized shredder was definitely starting to slow down. Eventually, it just stopped.

I can't complain. It has given me five years of decent service (including CD's, dvd's, credit cards plus up to 10 sheets of all kinds of paper at a time). But it's now time for it to make the trip out to the curb and for a newer, younger, prettier sturdier model to take over.

I'm torn between the Fellowes or the housebrand for Staples.

If anybody has any suggestions for a nice, cross-cut shredder (which can do plastic, too), please pipe up.

Thankyew.

The New Lyndon Johnson

Well McCain finally blurted out the truth in public. It started with a speech he was giving at some college when he started getting heckled. After the protesters had been shown out, he retorted to the remaining crowd that he will "never surrender in Iraq?"

As I've said before, he sat out the better part of the Vietnamese War in a POW camp and watched his country lose -- and now he's determined to not allow that to happen on HIS watch.

I believe that he believes that our country was shamed by that fiasco, and that he is on a sacred mission to salvage our national honor, tarnished and disgraced by involvement in an unwinnable civil war in Southeast Asia, by winning, no matter the costs, another unwinnable civil war, this one in the Middle East.

George W. Bush has spent 8 years on a mission to salvage his family's lost honor in the 1st Iraq War. And now John wants to continue salvaging honor, but for totally different reasons.

It doesn't matter. I have a strong aversion to men on missions.

Everyone should have a strong aversion to men on missions. No matter who they are or what they believe. They are death personified.

===============================================

On a lighter note, I played hookey from work today and got the car serviced, did a little shopping, picked up my dry-cleaning and, oh, yeah, sat through a mind-numbing 90 minute first meeting with the nutritionist (pre-bariatric surgery) and a 45 minute pulmonary test with my internist/pulmonologist. For somebody who smoked for 30 years I passed with flying colors. The test involved being locked in an isolation booth and breathing heavily, which I haven't been allowed to do on the telephone ever since I got sober. But this time I was breathing into and out of some apparatus hooked up to some contraption. I was sure I'd die. Or at least, pass out.

So, the Bariatric Surgery ball continues to roll. Next go-round with doctors is a week from Thursday when I see the surgeon (again) and the psychologist.

Onward to a new life!

Gastric Bypass - The Saga Continues

I'm leaving work early today to attend my second session of the Bariatric Surgery Support Group down home. I have to attend these things, once a month, for a couple of months as part of my pre-certification process for having my gastric bypass done (still hoping for an August date).

The holiday weekend coming up is almost an afterthought. On Tuesday I'll be taking the day off to visit the nutritionist in the morning (9:00 a.m.) and my internist/pulmonologist in the afternoon (2:00).

Somewhere in there I need to get an oil change, drop the laundry off, spend Saturday afternoon, evening and Sunday morning with some friends of mine who live in Queens and try to get some rest.

And rest EASIER I shall. My brother and his neighbor did, indeed, show up last night to pick up the 10-Ton Sony TV from Hell. After much "oomping" and "ouching" it was down the stairs, out the door and loaded onto the neighbor's truck.

It's their headache now. I just hope they have a piece of furniture that'll hold it.

It does weigh 160 pounds, after all. About what I weighed in my junior year of high school.

I'm told that I may count on losing up to 85 pounds after the surgery. It might not be quite what I weighed in high school... but it's awfully close to what I weighed in college.

And wouldn't that be loverly?

Something Old, Something New, Something Used

No, I'm not running off to LA to get married. I'm referring to yesterday's blog about Senator McCain. I started to have little guilt-icks last night about posting it, thinking that maybe I was "swift-boating" him.

And after I thought about it for awhile I suddenly realized that I WAS swift-boating him and for a very good reason. Because he deserves it.

Now, as for today. Well, actually, about last night. My brother called me around 7:30 and said that he'd FINALLY gotten a firm commitment out of his next door neighbor and they were wondering if they could come over to my place tonight and pick up the

10 TON SONY TV FROM HELL.

At long last. It's been sitting on my coffee table for the better part of a month now. And even though I'm the world's worst housekeeper, even I was starting to feel annoyed by it's presence.

Now it just remains to be seen whether or not they show up. AND that they're able to wrangle this thing down the winding stairs of the decrepit Victorian I share with the landlady's granddaughter and her boyfriend.

Let us all hope and pray to God that it departs, safely, and gives my brother as many years of faithful and flawless service as it's given me (7 years).

It's getting to be that time of the year when I love to undertake projects I should've finished years ago. Like putting 40 year old photos into albums. Or converting 40 year old vinyl recordings into digital tracks on my PC, which I can then burn onto CDs. And let me tell you exactly how long it takes to lose interest in THAT mind-numbing little chore! Then, of course, there's the most odious job of all:

HAULING OLD COMPUTER CRAP TO THE RECYCLING CENTER

And I have GOT to find someplace I can take my old bedroom carpet to have cleaned and returned to me, rolled on a huge cardboard tube and wrapped in paper until I decide what to do with it.

And, finally, I have to have the big, comfy chair and sofa bed re-upholstered.

That ought to kill all summer, except for vacation.

Who has time to shop for a boyfriend??

John McCain

I see where Senator McCain has started the standard election-year practice of the Republican candidate hammering on the (presumptive) Democratic nominee for lack of foreign policy experience, spinelessness, ass-kissing our "enemies" left and right and all round wimpishness when it comes to "handling" the World.

The Republicans have gotten away with this bullshit ever since I can remember. And to make it even worse, they parade out iconic macho-man images to serve the purpose of making their party the "Red-Blooded He-Man Woman Hater's Club" party. Iconic macho men like John Wayne (who never served a day in his life except when he single-handedly attacked Iwo Jima in the movies), or Ronnie Rayguns (whose only experience in battle were the dogfight scenes in "Hellcats of the Navy".)

Hardly a week goes by without some family-value spouting Republican getting caught, drunk, with his pants down, in some men's room or else shacking up with his girlfriend (and their infant child) in Virginia.

The Republican Party is the party of blatant hypocrisy and of sheer, "fuck you", capitalism. It's the party of panty-waisted, draft-dodging, pasty-faced, Pillsbury Doughboy chicken-hawks. It's the party of self-loathing, closeted Capitol Hill staffers who spend their summers in Rehoboth Beach, screaming their Nelly-Queen heads off before heading back to DC to help their fag-bashing bosses get re-elected. They don't call it the Gay Old Party for nothing in DC.

Show me a Republican and I'll show you somebody who never thinks twice about blaming somebody (or something) else for all of their problems (fags, immigrants, niggras, wetbacks, spics, cocksuckers... women). Show me a Republican and I'll show you somebody who thinks that war is just dandy... as long as somebody else fights (and dies) in it.

The Republican Party gave us, in my lifetime, Eisenhower (who sat idly by twiddling his thumbs while McCarthy conducted his witchhunts), Nixon (and what an anti-semitic, bottom-feeding insecure little scumbag he was), Ford (who meant well but was pretty incompetent), the unemployed actor who pleaded stupidity when told that he'd APPROVED the sale of arms to Iran in order to illegally fund the Nicaraguan Contras), King George the First ("a thousand points of light...") and King George the Second (IRAQ -- brought to you by KBR and Halliburton).

To give a few of those gentlemen their due, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and KGI actually did serve in the armed forces, during wars.

But along comes Senator McCain. And the Republicans LOVE to trumpet the fact that John is a "genuine American hero" because he flew sorties over North Vietnam, had his plane shot down, bailed out and was captured and held for years.

To which I take exception.

Don't get me wrong. I feel for him. I'm sure he suffered the insufferable at the hands of the North Vietnamese. But the fact of the matter is, merely being captured by the enemy does not automatically confer "hero" status on anyone.

Thousands of others flew missions over the north, and the vast majority of them returned unscathed.

Senator McCain, however, had his plane shot out from under him. And when I was in the same Navy that he was in, that would've been far more likely to elicit ridicule and scorn amongst his fellow pilots than it would've stirred up any feelings of hero worship.

I respect the man as a well-intentioned, doddering old fool.

But a hero? HAR! Not likely.

The Preakness

But before we begin, let's take care of today's political business:





And take a few minutes to watch this. I love watching politicians getting hung by their own petards:



And now, onto today's blog.

For reasons that had nothing to do with my friends, this was a terrible weekend to travel to Baltimore.

I stopped at Chesapeake House (a rest stop on the Interstate with gas, Starbucks, a half-dozen fast food joints, a souvenir shop and a couple of restrooms) en route from New Jersey to my friends' house in the B'more B'urbs. I thought I'd wandered into a casting call for a summer theater production of "Guys and Dolls", there were so many cheezy track types (and their molls) hanging around the place. It was only when I was back in my car, with the radio now tuned to a Baltimore station, that I realized that Saturday afternoon was the running of The Preakness. And every denizen of Damon Runyonland seemed to be heading to Pimlico to watch the race.

I eventually got to my friends' place and we had a lovely afternoon and evening. We played a couple of games of Scrabble (and I even won one of them), had wonderful conversations and a couple of wonderful meals. I got to say "goodbye" to my friends' dog, who will probably have to be put down in the next couple of weeks (kidney failure). I left yesterday around 12:30 p.m. for what usually is a 3 hour drive.

It took 4. All those characters who'd headed south on Saturday were heading north on Sunday.

In a driving storm, windshield wipers going full-blast, still only able to see about 20 feet in front of the car, bumper to bumper, at about 35 miles per hour.

I had originally told my sister, who lives in Newark, Delaware, that I would "drop by" on my way home on Sunday. I called her as we crept across the bridge that spans the delta of the Susquehanna River as it empties into the top of the Chesapeake Bay. The winds were blowing sideways at about 30 miles per hour.

I told her that I was sorry, but that she wouldn't be seeing my @ss that day. She understood.

Rather than taking the NJ Turnpike, I started out taking I-295 after crossing the Delaware River, but I only got as far as Exit 3 before I had to hop off in order to find a gas station to refuel (KA-CHING!!! ANOTHER 40 BUCKS.) I made the mistake of getting on the turnpike instead of going back to 295. I continued to creep along the last 40 miles or so home and eventually got there around 4:15.

I collapsed. My patellas were killing me. I had to piss like a horse. I popped a couple of Indomethicin's, ate a giant salad, collapsed in the COMFY CHAIR and turned on the Giant HDTV.

And speaking of horses.... doesn't it look like Big Brown just might do it?

President Douche

Can you believe what that dipshit, asshole, nincompoop president of ours said this time?

By using the word "appeasement" in denigrating anybody who isn't the warmonger he is, he deliberately tried to paint himself as a 21st Century Winston Churchill, the lone voice in the wilderness against Neville Chamberlain in pre-WWII England.

Well I've got a hot flash for Dubya. He is NO Winston Churchill. He never was and he never will be.

My greatest hope for our current president is that he lives out his days, peacefully and quietly, back home on the ranch in Crawford, Texas. Unloved, unremembered and consigned to the dustheap of history. And I really hope he can't raise a single dime from public appearances, either. That he will be such an enormous embarassment to politicians on both sides of the aisle that he never gets invited anywhere, nor consulted on anything.

That's my hope for him.

What a dolt. What a jerk. What a self-aggrandizing, egotistical megalomaniac!

How do the kids phrase it?

Oh, yeah. What a douche.

Said "Californy is the place you oughta be....."

so they loaded up the truck
and they moved to Beverly
... Hills, that is.
... swimming pools
... movie stars

and now

GAY MARRIAGE!

(unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard that today the California Supreme Court struck down the referendum which defined marriage as being only between a man and a woman)

Jane Hathaway would've been thrilled. At long last she could've popped the question to the object of her affection... Ellie Mae.

And I could've popped the question to the object of mine... Jethro Bodine.

Actually, I could've popped the question years ago to several likely candidates in Los Angeles. But no, not me. I had to pick the most emotionally unavailable human poseur it was ever my misfortune to encounter in an internet chat room. To be honest it wasn't all his fault. I threw my heart at him, while it was still freshly broken from a 15 year relationship that went "kaput" one day. And I fell all over him when he showed a fair amount of interest in me.

But the moment I found out he was a science fiction writer warning bells should've gone off in my head. Writers, even semi-famous ones, are always looking for a handout and a sugar-daddy to take care of mundane matters such as, oh, cash.

We were doomed from the outset. I had a couple of bucks, but we ran through that real fast.

Of course, I'd always been doomed from the outset with all my love interests over the years. Either they were way too sane for me (crush #1 and lover #1) or way too psychotic (crush #2 and lover's #2 and #3) and whatever you'd care to call the writer. Words like "sociopathic" come to mind.

It was always something, but to be honest, lover #1 was hot, considerate, loving, gentle and the blondest blonde (to the point of golden white ... everywhere) I'd ever met. And it was a romantic meeting. Our eyes, literally, met across a crowded dance floor. Well, after three months of that normality I was going nuts (... nuttier than usual). I dropped him like a hot potato. He even showed up, three months later, begging me to reconsider. And once again I foolishly threw the baby out with the bathwater.

What a stupid, self-centered nit I was.

My point, if I have one, is that it's all well and good for everyone to get the "right" to be married to persons of the same sex, but we need to face the fact that gays are just as likely to have their marriages explode in their faces as straight people are.

And I know from whence I speak. Would having had a full-blown marriage made any difference to me in those relationships many years ago? I doubt it. I'm not optimistic regarding my own chances for wedded, same-sex, bliss.

That sort of thing only happens in fairy tales, when the Princess knows a good thing when she sees it.

Unlike me.

No Starch in the Dhoti, S'il vous plait.

S.J. Perelman was a playwright, author, wit, bon vivant and all around good sport. He wrote the screenplays to "Horse Feathers", "Monkey Business" and the Academy Award winning script to "Around the World in Eighty Days" (the real one), after all. He regularly cavorted with the Marx Brothers.

He also wrote a ton of little throwaway pieces, later collected into various volumes of his wit and wisdom, one of which bore the title, above.

He wrote it as the result of a phrase he'd read in an article in the New Yorker which went, "the late Pandit Motilal Nehru - who sent his laundry to Paris - the young Jawaharlal's British nurse, etc., etc."

I mean, how could he have resisted? I've read the entire piece. It's actually a faux exchange of increasingly heated letters between Nehru and his "blanchisseur" in Paris in which he complains, bitterly, about the over-bleaching, over-beating and over-starching of his garments, to the point where they simply fall apart in shreds the moment he unboxes them upon the end of their 9,000 mile round trip to the City of Lights from India. It ends with him threatening lawsuits and bodily harm to the unflappable Frenchman, who clearly couldn't care less about the opinions of some insignificant brown man from some obviously uncivilized part of the World.

The piece appears in a collection of Perelman's works entitled, "Under the Spreading Atrophy - or The Road to Milltown."

I had acquired the book as a teenager, totally by accident of course because it was a sure-fire bet that nobody in MY family had ever heard of, let alone read, anything by Perelman -- or anybody else above the level of Stan Lee, probably while browsing through some bookstore in Philadelphia.

I used to lie in bed at night and read parts of it, laughing out loud to myself -- and amazing myself in the process over how much I seemed to inately "get" the sophistication of some of the humor. I knew, then, that someday the Mother Ship would return and carry me off to be with my "own people" who had clearly abandoned me to my fate with these Earthlings years before.

I started to understand the concept of the "double-entendre" and started to "get" hyperbole, irony and sarcasm. I saw how words could heal... or hurt... as needed. I began to practice on the people around me.

Alas, that was like shooting fish in a barrel because they hadn't a clue as to what I was talking about and I have NO DOUBT that I appeared as alien to them as they, in turn, seemed to me.

But through it all, the service years, college and in various homes and cities over the years, I've kept that little yellowed volume of the writings of S.J. Perelman.

The little Irish Catholic kid grew up wanting nothing more than to be a very funny Jewish man.

I wanted to be anything other than what I was. One of "those people."

Tires, Stitches, Greening America & Mommie Dearest

I took one look outside last Friday morning and decided to call in well ("I feel great -- I won't be there!") Actually, I knew I was going to blow off work by the time I left the office Thursday night. The weather was forecast to be shitty and it didn't disappoint.

I was seeing the eye doctor at 4:30 to get the giant stitch in my eyelid removed, so that gave me the day to kill. So I went in search of new tires for the car.

My Honda Element came with Goodyear Wranglers -- the biggest pieces of crap it has ever been my misfortune to own. They lasted exactly 32,375 miles. I do NOT recommend them.

I wound up at Sam's Club at 10:00 a.m. in a driving rain and found out they only had one set of tires in stock that would fit my car. And they did not come with any guarantee.

The $600 government rebate was burning a hole in my bank account so I crossed over Route 1 and dropped into the Firestone store. They had a lovely set of Bridgestones which were, frankly, less than I expected to pay and which came with a 60k mile treadlife guarantee. They were installed in a thrice and I was once more safely on the highways of New Jersey, in a monsoon.

The only movie of note which opened over the weekend was that trashy Vegas thing, which I decided to skip, so I killed time at home until it was time to see the eye doctor.

I'd spent all week thinking that he'd put two stitches into the incision. But I was wrong. It was one, giant, stitch, tied off at both ends of the incision, with the majority of the thread hidden inside the lid someplace. He snipped the ends and yanked it out and my eye, VOILA!, looks nearly as good as new (well, I no longer look like I'm winking at everybody, thank God!).

Saturday I drove up to northwestern NJ to personally inspect the construction site of a new home being built by really close friends of mine. It was amazing. It's huge. About 5,000 sq. ft. The ground floor is entirely his company -- he's an industrial designer. The upper two floors are the "living levels" of the house. It's constructed entirely of concrete slabs and industrial steel. Utterly fireproof. It's also green to the point where they'll always manufacture more electricity than they use (and will, eventually get a paycheck FROM PSE&G every month for the surplus juice they sell to the grid). The house is heated and cooled geothermally. They dug down 100's of feet to get to the permanent temperature line. Cooling tubes are embedded in the concrete slab floors and walls. The cantilevered roofs of the house and out-buildings will be totally covered with photovoltaic cells. There'll also be a wind-powered generator, about 100' tall, to crank out some power on cloudy days.

I spent nearly an hour there before I started feeling like a third-wheel at the construction site, so I left. I'm happy for my friends, but sad that they will be living so far away from me now. This couple has been there for me through thick and thin over the last 10 years, and I love them dearly.

I know I'll always be a welcome guest up there...

Sunday was a beautiful day, but....

I'm nearly 60 and I still have "issues" with my long-deceased mothers (my birth mom and her mom, my grandmother). You'd think I'd be able to move past all that by now.

It's amazing how we let people live, rent-free, inside of our heads. Even years after they've long since died. I guess I'm just one of those people who love to run a Hotel du Pain inside their head. Or at least feel compelled to do so.

I hope you all had a pain-free Mother's Day. I didn't.

Bush, Hillary, Dynasties & War

There's no avoiding it. We are a warlike people. Three-quarters of the country couldn't wait to jump on the Iraq bandwagon when it became pretty clear, pretty early, that we were not going to find Osama bin Laden anytime soon. We sure as hell knew where Saddam hid out. In one of his pleasure palaces, which you could easily see from one of our expensive war satellites in outer space.

We were pissed. We wanted to punish SOMEBODY, ANYBODY, for the events of 9/11. And we couldn't punish the idiots who wanted to go home to Allah. They'd already gone home to Allah. Or someplace. They weren't here anymore, that was for sure.

Saddam was handy and perfect. We still had a grudge against him ever since Shrub's daddy, King Wimp the First, failed to order Stormin' Norman to take Baghdad using the same scorched earth policy which General Sherman had once, thoroughly, used against the South. We like scorched earth policy. Most of us secretly wonder, sometimes, why we can't just nuke the entire Middle East back to the Stone Age.

And so we went to war.

However, there was a problem with this. Other than a bloodthirsty electorate (and a cash-starved defense establishment which the Bush family owed plenty), we didn't really have anything to recommend actually going to war.

But dynasties like war. War perpetuates patriotic fervor. And patriotic fervor forgives and adores dictatorship (see: "Nazi Germany - 1932 - 1945"). And patriotic fervor, here in the USofA, loves (or loved) George W. Bush. He is smarmy. He has a rich daddy. He avoided dying during war himself by having his rich daddy arrange it.

In short, he is everything that most Americans want, jealously, to be. An arrogant, booze-swilling, drunken-frat boy at an Ivy League School, without a $$$$ care in the world, and a dad who can "fix" everything because he has really cool rich friends who'd do anything for him.

Right?

So Dubya's on the one hand. On the other we have Billary. I have nothing against her, except that she's married to Douchebag and to be honest I've never seen bigger politicians in my life, in the nastiest sense of the word. They'd tell anybody anything in order to get elected. And have. (I did not inhale. I did not have sex with that woman. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?)

It still smarts to remember exactly how they threw their gay constituency under the bus way back when.

The Bushs' suck but then, so do the Clintons.

So I don't like politicians because they'll start wars just for the fun of it (and to make their rich friends even richer), say anything, toss their friends aside at the drop of a hat and live to see their closest relatives inherit their jobs.

I want Bush out.

I want Hillary out.

I want Barack Obama for President.

Gastric Bypass - My Saga Begins

Okay, it's official. Barring any unforeseen circumstances (such as me turning into a big wimp between now and then), I'm going to have gastric bypass surgery, hopefully in August.

I've lined up all the initial consultations I need to have over the next few months.

Insurance companies, rightfully, want to make sure you're serious about the surgery before they waste 100's of thousands of their other client's premiums paying for something you're promptly going to sabotage because you have unresolved addiction issues.

I don't blame 'em.

So over the next month I'll be seeing my internist, a pulmonologist, a nutritionist, my cardiologist and a shrink. Meanwhile I'll have continuing consultations with the surgeon and attend monthly meetings of his bariatric support group (more like a cult - but if he can turn off my diabetes, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, joint pain and artheriosclerosis I'll happily join the other worshippers at his shrine).

Oh, and the reason for the shrink is to make sure I'm not doing this for vanity's sake.

Anybody who knows me will tell you... vanity has never been my long suit. Fear and self-loathing are more my forte.

I just want to stop taking medicines. That would be very, very nice.

Oh, and I don't want to wind up in my old age strapped into a wheelchair in a nursing home, blind and footless, like so many of my relatives on the Irish side of the family did.

That would be even nicer.

You'll be hearing lots more about this over the next couple of months. So brace yourselves.

Ketchup

Been offline for a few days while recouperating from surgery on my eyelid last Friday. So today I'm playing "catch-up."

The surgery was to correct the "half-mast" eyelid caused by nerve damage as a result of my fall in the shower last January.

Friday morning, bright and early, my opthalmologist scrubbed up, anesthetized the lid and proceeded to do a "lid-lift." I was in at 8 and out by 9. I had a good time the rest of the day and just goofed-off in front of the new HDTV.

Saturday was a different story. It itched and burned like hell. I kept applying cold compresses to it throughout the day, but still it itched and burned. It FINALLY occured to me on Sunday afternoon that it's the height of allergy season here, so I popped a Claritin last night and slept like a baby.

I'm back in the saddle today. And speaking of horses:

In Memorium
Eight Belles
A Filly Who Was All Heart

I watched the Kentucky Derby Saturday afternoon. It was great up until they ran the filly into the ground and killed her for no good reason other than corporate greed. It really pissed me off. As good as she was, she had no business being paired up with the big boys.

The racing business in this country is a disgrace and the way they treat the horses borders on animal cruelty.

But, alas, gambling is big business with lots of friends in high places.

Sad. Very sad.

Finally, we have this today. The New Jersey Hall of Fame has inducted 15 new members, including The Boss (Springsteen), Sinatra, Yogi Berra and a slew of others. There was an article about it over at the Huffington Post and, in the comments section, one comment in particular really resonated with me. Here it is:

"New Jersey is the Europe of America, (ad hominem attack on another poster)! No death penalty, sane gun laws, paid family leave for a new baby or sick relative, an effective if a little late open space policy and unions for gay couples. Yes we have our warts but we are moving forward at a much faster and progressive rate than the rest of the country. Oh, also a couple towns over is the Quaker settlement of Moorestown, the best place to live in the country the last few years in a row. It's also the weirdest state in the country, and I mean that in a good way. Check out google earth and look at some of the crazy stuff, south Jersey is the strangest."

At 10 years, I have now passed the point of being a New Yorker and am now proud to be from the Garden State!

Mullets and all.