I Despise The Forwarded Joke Emails But Every Once In Awhile…Don’t Get Me Started!

I’ve told everyone I know that the fastest way to be deleted from my inbox is to send me a joke of the day or something you think is hi-larious and you’ve forwarded it to your seventeen hundred “closest” friends. The only thing worse than these are the dreaded chain emails that tell you that you have to forward it to ten people immediately or become fatter, balder and Satan’s mistress if you don’t. I hate all of these and anyone who is a good friend of mine knows this. And the whole Facebook thing of forwarding videos, jokes, requests for a gun in “Mafia Wars” etc. seems like an extension of the whole forwarded email thing and I hate that too. I despise the forwarded joke emails but every once in awhile…Don’t Get Me Started!

So here goes, the one that was forwarded to me recently that I didn’t delete right away and I enjoyed. They’re rare and I will rarely inflict them upon anyone but hey, it was a slow day for blogging so here you go…

Nothing sucks more than that moment during an argument when you realize you're wrong.

I despise the forwarded joke emails but every once in awhile…Don’t Get Me Started!

Nevada Domestic Partner Law Answers – Don’t Get Me Started!

So if you read yesterday’s blog you know that I was more than a little confused about the whole Domestic Partner law going into effect on October 1, 2009 here in Nevada. (Read it here http://hubpages.com/hub/What-The-Hell-IS-A-Domestic-Partnership-Maybe-Us-Gays-Arent-Doing-Our-Part) The good news is that not only did I know who to ask about it, they answered. And so it would come to pass that the lovely Bruce from GLAD (Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders) sent me the following response. Although it’s a little out of his jurisdiction (shall we say) I believe him! Nevada Domestic Partner law answers – Don’t Get Me Started!

What The Hell IS A Domestic Partnership? Maybe Us Gays Aren’t Doing Our Part? – Don’t Get Me Started!

On October 1, 2009 consenting adults meeting the requirements (and a review of their information by the State of Nevada) may legally enter into a Domestic Partnership. Of course the question everyone is asking me is if I’ve pre-registered, if I’m going to register, what it means for me and my partner (who I will have shared 21 years of my life with this next week) and what I’ve found is that after reading the actual law I’m not so sure anyone should be buying a Monte Blanc pen for us to sign or “register” with the state as it were. So I began to look online. I looked a lot. I wanted to see what the difference was between a marriage and a Domestic Partnership in the eyes of the law and do you know what I found? Nothing is what I found and suddenly I could no longer scream (inside my own head) that it was the right wing Catholic crazies or the Mormonians but perhaps it’s us gays not even getting the information that we need to our own group? What the hell IS a Domestic Partnership? Maybe us gays aren’t doing our part? – Don’t Get Me Started!

When someone asked me recently if I was excited about being able to be registered as a Domestic Partner, I went into my usual spiel about how it doesn’t give us all the rights that married people get, that it doesn’t state that employers are required to provide health benefits (because health benefit companies pressured lawmakers to remove that from the bill before it was a law) and then I finished up with what I heard Kathy Griffin say on her show, that there are at least 1,000 rights and benefits that married people get that Domestic Partners do not. The only problem with this argument is that I have no idea if what I’m saying is true in the least. Where is the spreadsheet that shows Domestic Partner benefits/rights on one side and then marriage rights/benefits next to it? A simple list with check marks next to what each one offers. I mean, if I can get that when comparing two different cameras online you’d think I’d be able to get if for something as important as my rights under the law, right? So where the hell is it?

My pal who asked the question about Domestic Partner vs. Marriage rights suggested that I create the spreadsheet myself but I’m not a legal expert and I had trouble reading through the actual law as it’s printed on the Nevada State site as it was, surely there must be some legal gay somewhere who has all ready done this, yes? Well, I’ll keep you posted as I wrote to a couple of the gay legal services and if the spreadsheet indeed exists and they answer me I’ll be sure and post it.

What I can tell you from reading the law is that it’s so confusing that it’s no wonder most of us don’t read the laws of our state or nation. For example, in the Domestic Partner law for Nevada it says over and over again that a Domestic Partner must (under the eyes of the law) be considered a “spouse” and as a spouse cannot be discriminated against. So that sounds good, right? But as you read along you begin to see the paragraphs that tell you the word “spouse” with regards to a Domestic Partnership does not and cannot imply a marital spouse, employers do not have to provide health benefits and that Domestic Partners are responsible for one another’s third party debt. Okay, so what does this tell me? It tells me that if I’m a registered Domestic Partner and the hospital won’t let me in, I can try to get a judge to order them to let me in before my spouse dies. It tells me we can own property together and have the same rights as married people if one of us dies. It tells me that I can’t put my Domestic Partner on my benefits unless my employer allows it and even if my employer allows it, I have to be taxed on the portion paid in by my employer as though it’s additional income (this does not happen to married people). It tells me that although we’re responsible for one another’s third party debts, legally we must still file separate income tax returns because the Federal Government doesn’t recognize our union.

And so I began to wonder if I was only looking at the negative of this situation. Maybe I am, I don’t know because I can’t find the facts that I’m looking for all I can find are lots of opinions (from bloggers like me and we all know how unreliable I can be so can you even imagine what some of these other bloggers are spewing?) but no real facts can I find. Where is my spreadsheet? Where are the legal gays when we need them? It isn’t Pride Week and I don’t think there are any White Parties happening at the moment so will one of you please take a moment from looking at porn online and let me know if my righteous indignation is needed on this issue? Because I can no longer blame everyone else in the world for this injustice if I don’t fully understand the injustice being done, right? And the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking the fault lies within us gays. (I know, shocking, right? The Gay Mafia is bound to be at my house when I get home to take my membership card.) But I’m just asking for the gays to consider for a moment… What the hell IS a Domestic Partnership? Maybe us gays aren’t doing our part? – Don’t Get Me Started!

It Must Be The First Day Of School, I Saw The Cheerleaders Smoking Outside Starbucks! – Don’t Get Me Started!

I don’t know that I ever greeted the first day of school with much of anything but dread. Having been beaten up in grade school and moving right into being called a “fag” several times a day in high school, the going back to school never filled me with as much child-like anticipation as I believe it did for my fellow classmates. I will say that I never lost hope, that I did always delude myself into thinking that the new year would bring many new opportunities for me and that perhaps all of the people who called me names or pushed me into lockers would have forgotten the bullseye I had put on my own back by wearing that damn green satin “OZ” jacket the first day of high school my freshman year or that they would have at least found a new target. But I did love shopping for the school supplies. Oh how I loved choosing the backpack, the lunchbox, all things related to school. As my partner tells everyone, “Scott had the neatest notebook in high school. Sure, he was failing every class but his books looked great!” This is not too far from the truth except for the fact that I was not all that horrible a student, only in math which I still to this day have little understanding about. If a train leaves a station at 60 miles per hour and another train leaves the station twenty minutes later going 80 miles per hour, which train will arrive first at Penn Station 100 miles away? My response would always be, “Are they going to see a Broadway show or just shopping at Barney’s?” Thus my failing grades in math throughout my school career but back to the topic at hand. As I got into my car to go to work this morning the DJs talked of the first day of school and I couldn’t help but think about the fun times I missed, the many people I saw each day and in my nostalgic haze, I got out of my car and was going into Starbucks when I realized it must be the first day of school, I saw the cheerleaders smoking outside Starbucks! – Don’t Get Me Started!

My high school was not in the type of neighborhood that required uniforms (if it did it probably would have saved me the Wizard of Oz jacket beatings) instead we wore whatever we thought was fashionable at the moment. Oh how I remember the parachute pants from Judy’s a store that really only sold women’s clothes but had a few racks devoted to men’s apparel. The people at the store would call me when something came in. I bought it all and looked like a cross between Adam Ant and Cher on most days. I honestly don’t even remember wearing a pair of khakis the entire high school experience. Ah but that was the time of the 27 inch waist, those were the days my friends. But enough of my reminiscences.

There they were, two of them sitting out in front of the Starbucks wearing their white polo tops and short plaid skirts. Normally this would make you think that they were wholesome and sweet. But the very dark eye liner ringing their eyes that was smeared a little gave this look more of the Britney Spears at 50 trying to get back into her school girl outfit from her first album. (A sort of disturbing image to be sure) In one hand they had a Venti something or other from Starbucks and in the other arm that was draped over the back of the chair with great ease tapered down to the hands with their short chewed finger nails covered in black polish that was chipping and between their index and middle fingers was the cigarette. At their feet were their duffle bags which featured the name of their school and the very large C-H-E-E-R spelled out the length of the bag. I watched them a bit as they sipped, talked, texted and never missed a drag off of their cigarette. As they decided they were done the packed up their duffle bag and holding the oversized plastic cups with little liquid left in them, they flicked their cigarette butts onto the ground and got into a Mercedes the price of which I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to afford.

And as they drove off and I sipped my coffee I wondered if kids still feel the way we felt on that first day of school? That rush of adolescent excitement of seeing friends once more, the acting “over it” to our parents and internally hoping that this year we’d be popular or at the very least not terrorized. Has the world changed so much? Am I really this old that I look at these kids through middle aged glasses? Or has the world really not changed at all, is it me who has changed? In high school I was still delighted over my Trapper Keeper notebook but these girls seemed more interested in their Marlboro menthols that they tossed in their Prada purses. Let’s face it, none of us have the same experience and time does do tricks on the memory but from now on I won’t think of glue sticks and lockers as much as I’ll think it must be the first day of school, I saw the cheerleaders smoking outside Starbucks! – Don’t Get Me Started!

What Julie & Julia Did For Bloggers – Don’t Get Me Started!

This past weekend I went to see the movie, Julie and Julia. I went more to see Meryl Streep and Amy Adams than anything else but as I sat there watching this movie about a woman working a nine to five job who decides she needs a purpose in her life and so she finds it by cooking through the Julia Child cookbook and blogging about it. Although everyone’s reasons for blogging differs (at least slightly) what I was taken with was the fact that this movie represented a dream come true for bloggers. Let’s face it, all bloggers hope that someone notices and puts you in the newspaper or picks your blog up and quotes it in an article but in this case not only did both of the above happen, the woman actually got a movie deal out of it and is now an author. Wow, how many of us sit typing away hoping that something like that will happen for us? All of us, that’s how many. What Julie & Julia did for bloggers – Don’t Get Me Started!

I started blogging because I had joined corporate America and missed getting the applause I had grown accustomed to from being on stage most of my life. (I didn’t know that was why I started blogging at the time but like most things, distance makes the heart grow fonder and sometimes a little clearer.) I remember the thrill I got from the first comments left on my blog, the people who emailed me, blogging for season 3 of Project Runway for Bravotv.com and eventually getting named one of The Advocate readers’ top ten blogs in 2006. It was heady stuff for someone who during the day was dealing with a company going through bankruptcy and being responsible for the training of 1500 employees across the US. To be able to write and have people actually respond, people who weren’t friends who didn’t have to tell me my stories were funny or people who told me how much a blog meant to them because they felt it too, it was a little like fitting into that pair of pants you haven’t fit into for years, you stand a little taller and walk with a bit more pep in your step.

And all the while I waited for the phone to ring, waiting to get that email from Rosie or some of the other celebs who were blogging, asking me to blog for them, with them or be on their show. It never happened. And while most of my blogging “fame” happened in 2006, here I am in 2009 still writing blogs and doing the occasional video blog and yet there’s still somewhere in the back of my mind that I think this blog entry will be the one that someone reads and decides they want to make me a contributor to their website or magazine. Hope can be just as intoxicating as those first few comments you receive on your blog. I have to be honest that I probably haven’t done everything I could or should have done to become a blogger of notice but when you see the movie (or read the book) about this particular blogger getting noticed you see that she just wrote, she didn’t worry about Adsense ads on her site or sharing links from her site with other sites to try and build readership. Then again, when she was blogging it was when blogging was in its infancy, times have changed. So you register your blog with blog listing sites and do what you can to publicize yourself but until your video blog get passed around like a cat playing the piano or something let’s face it, your chances of being “discovered’ among the millions of blogs out there are slight at best.

So for me, I came back to the original reason I began writing. Sure I began writing for the fame and fortune but more than that I wanted to share my opinions and thoughts on different topics. I wanted to show the world that you can be a forty-something gay and have the same morals, opinions as the straight couple across the street. I like to call myself a “garden variety” gay, not the kind you’ll see with a boa around his neck and shirt off on a Pride Parade float and at the same time, not a billion dollar gay who travels the world going to the White Party in every glamorous location. Just a man sharing his life with another man and trying to understand how in this day and age legislatures can still bar me from the rights and liberties the Constitution was supposed to guarantee me, still wondering why the person in front of me at Starbucks can’t get it that they need to know what they want before they get to the counter, and still bitching about reality television shows being two hours when I can Tivo through most in twenty minutes and not miss any of the good parts. And through this writing I discovered I was right. People agreed with me and embraced me, forwarding my website or blog to their friends or family. I found women in their thirties, forties and fifties writing to me, telling me that they agreed with my opinions and that I made them laugh a little about life. Then I had young gays writing to me asking for me to be the Gaytriarch I was for my own family for them and offer them some advice.

On the whole it’s been very rewarding though the fame and fortune has eluded me. And because I live my life based on musical theatre I can’t help but think about the moment in the musical Gypsy when Mama Rose is confronted by Louise and Rose realizes that all her pushing to make Louise and her sister a star was done for herself. Rose says, “I guess I did it for me….I just wanted to be noticed.” And I think that’s true of almost every blogger out there. So thanks for sharing your reading time with me and for noticing me. And thank you for Julie who blogged about Julia which gives all of us bloggers hope that we’ll be “discovered.” What Julie & Julia Did For Bloggers – Don’t Get Me Started!

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People Who Write To Me – Don’t Get Me Started!

On the whole the people who write to me are just wonderful people. I’m including in this the people who comment on my blogs as well as the people who actually send me emails. I have to say that on the whole, I get more comments and emails from women than men which is always a surprise to me, well, sort of. I mean, let’s face it, as gay kid growing up, it was my gal pals that were always laughing at my jokes and enjoying me much more than the athletic male set who used me for ridicule and general punching bag. Still, I have to say that I’m like a kid (back in the day) who would receive something in the mail. Remember how excited we used to get when in the mailbox was something addressed to you, not your parents? When someone comments or sends an email I get all excited. Can’t wait to see which blog they read or watched, what they thought, etc. because as I’ve said millions of times before, when you send these blogs out into InternetWorld you don’t really know if anyone is reading them or not unless they respond. But recently someone made a comment that I can’t help but continue to think about and I just wonder about people who write to me – Don’t Get Me Started!

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t just like the positive comments. I’ve had a straight write to me to explain their repulsion of gays, I’ve had people send me bible quotes and tell me they were going to pray for me and on occasion I’ve even had the comment that someone was wishing my death. I guess it all comes with the territory when you put yourself out there.

I’ve received numerous comments from women who were either looking for a gay best pal in their neck of the woods as well as daughters who are in their thirties who then forward my blogs to their mothers and then I have both mother and daughter writing in – love that! Along the way I’ve also had some younger gays write in for some advice. I think I love these most of all. As with a teacher or anyone else who has dealings with young people, there’s just something about passing knowledge down that can’t help but make you feel as though you’re doing a good turn. It also reminds you that you’re no longer in that fourteen year old place anymore, you’ve been through it and you’ve come out the other side. In my own family I’m the self-proclaimed Gaytriarch and I have to admit that I love being a Gaytriarch to the online masses too!

But perhaps the most confusing to me are the emails and comments I get from people who have obviously not even read the blog entry. For example, I wrote a blog titled, “The International Gay, I Mean International Male Catalog” and I had more than one person asking me to send them a catalog but the best was some guy who actually wanted a Moto jacket that had been stolen and was looking to replace it. (Read the blog and comments here http://hubpages.com/hub/The_International_Gay_I_Mean_International_Male_Catalog) So that’s funny, right? But this past week I received a comment on one of the blogs I’d written awhile back that I didn’t even really remember what the blog was about at first. After re-reading it, it was one I did about how watching Maury and Dr. Phil make me feel better about myself because somewhere in my DNA it makes me feel better about myself to see others who seem so misguided or what have you. Well, the comment this woman wrote just stunned me. She didn’t tell me I was going to hell because I was getting off on the misfortune of others, instead she sent her plea to me as if I WAS Maury or Dr. Phil.

Here’s the comment:

No I Will Not Accept Your Child As My Friend On Facebook And Other Facebook Annoyances – Don’t Get Me Started!

I am not a parent. I do not say that I know how to be a good parent but I can tell you that the one thing that my child would not be doing is “friending” the adult friends of my parent’s or even be on Facebook at ten years old. I don’t understand where these misguided parenting decisions come from but that’s not the only thing annoying me as of late on Facebook. However, it’s a good jumping off point, as they say. No, I will not accept your child as my friend on Facebook and other Facebook annoyances – Don’t Get Me Started!

It happened weeks ago and yet I still see it every time I log in. A friend whom I’ve known for quite some time, had her daughter try to “friend” me on Facebook. At first I was just sort of shocked, staring at the name and photo of the cherubic girl in my inbox. I didn’t understand and I still don’t. Now I’m not saying that my Facebook page is something to be ashamed of but I don’t want a ten year old to have access to my blog entry about the reasons why I could never be a male prostitute. I write for an adult audience and I’d like to keep it that way. The annoying thing is that the parent we’re talking about knows and has read my blog. But that’s all beside the point. The point is that I don’t understand why a child is on Facebook or why they might possibly need to be on Facebook. What? Do they have friends from kindergarten that they haven’t seen in three years trying to reconnect with them? I’m going to go way far out on the limb and just say that I don’t think kids should be on Facebook. And although I know there are “privacy settings” I could enact that would keep the girl from certain aspects of my Facebook life, the point is that I don’t think I should have to do that much work and while we’re on the subject why IS that stuff such work on Facebook?

When I signed up for Facebook everyone told me how much easier it was than MySpace or any of the other similar sites. When I first joined, I “allowed access” to every snowball thrown at me or any quiz or piece of crap my friends sent. I had no idea how they affected me on Facebook so it was sort of a non-issue but two years into it and those pesky invites to stop animal cruelty in third world nations are becoming increasingly annoying (though I still just hit ignore). And on the rare occasion when I do want to stop cruelty in third world nations it takes me to three hundred other pages where I have to ask my friends to be against animal cruelty and I don’t know, bark like a seal or something. Too complicated and so I always just end up not doing anything about the animal cruelty in third world nations. So cruel away third world nations and I’d blame Facebook if I were you for not getting my support.

Someone recently told me that I needed a Facebook page for my website, Some Like It Scott. Well, I created one for myself so how hard could it be to create one for my website, right? Wrong. I got started and the first thing that happened was I added a profile pic and it became the profile pic on my personal page. I don’t know how it happened but all my friends saw the picture (which wasn’t a new one by the way) and immediately began weighing in saying everything from I looked good to “you look like Grandpa Munster…gray much?” I tried to find the setting that would allow me to change my profile pic without notifying the world and there seemed to be no answer to this question. I couldn’t be the only one who felt like this, could I? I went to the help message boards where people who are addicted to Facebook assist you instead of professionals. They tell you what to click to achieve the desired result and sometimes it’s more complicated than putting together furniture from Ikea (but a lot like it, it looks so simple when you look at the picture but there you stand when it’s constructed with the Allen wrench in your hand wondering why you have three extra screws and the bookcase is leaning). I got so frustrated that I just decided that I didn’t care anymore who saw or was notified of the picture change but how would I automatically import my YouTube videos that I create the way that I had set it up on my personal page? There seemed to be no help on the message boards for that one, instead I found myself just clicking away for an hour or so wishing that I lived in the day and age when the Pony Express a-comin’ to town was the way we communicated.

For something that is supposed to be so simple I find it increasingly difficult to do anything on the damn thing. Other than sending friends messages (and quickly deleting friend’s messages who don’t realize they’re posting on my “wall” where everyone can now see their new home address and phone number instead of sending me a message privately) or poking my friends I spend more time being confused, avoiding people who have “discovered” me after us not speaking for fourteen years than anything else on Facebook. So let’s recap, no letting your ten year old on Facebook and Facebook needs to simplify the way it works. Whew, I feel better. No, I will not accept your child as my friend on Facebook and other Facebook annoyances – Don’t Get Me Started!

Gay Movies Made By Gays For Gays On Logo – Don’t Get Me Started!

Well I finally did it, added the Logo Network (for gays) to my cable line up. I don’t know exactly what I expected but I can tell you that some falls very short of my expectations. The problem is that much like a car accident or someone wearing something that doesn’t look good on them I find that I just can’t look away. Well, that’s not altogether true. I can seem to look away (or change the channel as the case may be) when the blocks of lesbian programming come on. This is no knock to lesbians it’s just that I’m not a lesbian and so seeing dramas or even comedies with nothing but lesbians leaves me less than interested. (Hey, I’m just being honest) There is something about seeing television made for us gays though that I have to commend them on. I mean I guess I just thought that Lifetime (television for women and gays) was the closest we could get to a channel devoted to us but with that claim that your television for one group of the population there has to be some responsibility too, yes? Just because the show or movie has a woman in it doesn’t mean that it’s simply got to be on Lifetime, right? And wouldn’t that same logic go for Logo? Apparently not but perhaps that’s because there’s less to choose from. And while I’m not blaming Logo entirely for their programming I have to say that I was surprised at how many gay movies are made (not porno) and can’t help wondering where these movies ever play besides on the Logo channel and why they’re so bad. Gay movies made by gays for gays on Logo – Don’t Get Me Started!

I saw Brokeback Mountain, The Wedding Banquet and Jeffrey in theatres (the only specifically gay movies I can think of that I went to a theater to see). I watched Lonely Hearts Club and a few other less than stellar gay films ad nausea on cable. And while the ones I’ve seen on cable seem to be more the speed of what’s on Logo, there seems to be a whole community of gay filmmakers who seem to me to be like the Ed Wood of their time. You know, “B” movie makers who seem to find the money to get their movies produced but they become instant camp classics because the script and acting are so bad. I know that’s not what they’re going for when they make them but come on, how many sensitive gay men can you see traversing their sexuality and lives by moving from their small town to LA? And why is it that all of the movies seem to take place in LA? Easier on the budget and finding locations perhaps?

Here’s the deal, to me watching these movies is a lot like watching a novella on Telemundo. I  don’t understand the language but it’s very dramatic and I just know that every man is going to take off his shirt at some point. A recent viewing should serve our purpose as an example. The movie was called “East Side Story” and I’ll admit I didn’t watch the whole movie. The movie (or title anyway) is obviously a take on the musical West Side Story except it’s all about the Hispanic guy who works at his family restaurant, is very sensitive, has a crush on his white neighbor (who is with and lives with another white guy in a  neighborhood that is portrayed as the Barrio) and from what I saw there were not any racial problems other than the insipid scenes where the white neighbor comes over showing he’s learned some phrases in Spanish which I know is supposed to be adorable but I think I would find annoying in real life. Then again, I’m not living the life of a sensitive Latino man who has been sleeping with the same closeted guy for over a year who ends up getting engaged to my aunt and I have to tell her only for her to break off the engagement and see the closeted lover find another stupid woman to entrap later in the movie. The scripts to these movies are awful, the acting is awful and I just don’t understand it. For an industry that is run by Jews and gays I don’t know how they let this happen. Artistically is bad (which should bother the gays) and I can’t imagine these movies making any money (which should bother the Jews).

So you have movies like East Side Story that seem to play on the channel and in between they play a movie that was released in theatres with something gay about it over and over again. I guess that’s the same with any cable channel as they try to fill their schedules but come on, how many times can we be expected to look at My Own Private Idaho?

Look, I want to like movies that are made by gays for gays and I want to love Logo but I just can’t at the moment. Does it make me a traitor to my community (or gaggle of gays) that I want and think we should do better? I’m not a film maker so I’m not going to be making a movie anytime soon but this is my plea to those of you gay moviemakers who are reading this…be better at what you do because this crap you’re doling out ain’t hitting on nothing. (Yes, all the double negative purposely included). Don’t blame the budget because there have been wonderful films made on small budgets. Just try to stop casting with the bulge in your pants perhaps. Just because the guy’s abs are great doesn’t mean he can deliver the soul searching monologue in the third reel and while we’re on the subject, rethink those long monologues where the main character sits and reviews his life as these are usually so poorly written that they’ve got to be as cringe worthy when you read them on the page as they are on the fourteenth take which eventually appears in the movie. Someone has to bring a little reality to the proceedings, I know we’re supposed to support our community but you’ve got to give us something to be proud of too. It’s like the rainbow on everything gay, just because it’s got a rainbow on it I don’t need to buy it or tell the artist they’re wonderful. Sometimes a rainbow is just a rainbow and frankly other than on my Mork suspenders I’m not interested. Gay movies made by gays for gays on Logo – Don’t Get Me Started!

DOMA Really DOA – Don’t Get Me Started!

Oh, I hoped, I really did that with Obama would come some of the much needed change in this country and I still hold that hope out there but recent events have me raising an eyebrow and cocking my head like the RCA Victor dog, Nipper. As with all politicians and many of our laws they are written in such a way so as to not have you know unless you read it seventeen times if they’re for or against something. Thus the problem with Prop 8 in California, many thought that a vote “yes” was a vote for gay marriage instead of a “yes, we have no bananas” way of saying that you were voting “yes” but that was a vote against gay marriage. So the Obama White House issued a press release the other day and as everyone scrambles to understand how yes can mean no, allow me. The Obama White House is against the Defense Of Marriage Act but will continue to uphold the law until the law is changed. When will the law be changed? Could it be like the other promises Obama made when he was campaigning to the gay community that was throwing support, money and well designed clothes his way? Like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell which doesn’t allow service members to serve as openly gay humans? With Don’t Ask Don’t tell we were told Obama is too busy to handle these issues right now, supposedly. So while soldiers continue to be discharged dishonorably and lose their veteran benefits, we’re told he’s really busy. Okay Obama but as a gay man I’m starting to think that you being busy is just a ruse to keep us supporting you but getting nothing in return and this recent step just makes me think that they should get rid of the “M” in DOMA and call it what it is, Defense Of Assholes! DOMA really DOA – Don’t Get Me Started!

I don’t understand nor will I ever how laws such as DOMA ever got on the books. It’s not legislation it’s legisHATEon. I don’t care what anyone says you can’t tell me that gays getting married is going to cause problems for our government, you just can’t. It’s not the same as bestiality or pedophilia as some religious right would have you believe. And the religious right who are still running the country are the Assholes that continue to have their backward way of thinking turned into law and defended instead of our rights as gay citizens being defended. I get that some “think” that marriage is only between a man and a woman because that’s what they’ve always known but if you follow that line of thinking then we would never have stopped using leaches to suck blood out of people to suck out infection because that’s the way it was always done.

Look, I don’t think that gays are more equipped to have a successful marriage then straight people, I just know that when the laws of my state and government don’t even recognize or allow me to get married then there’s something wrong here. Why are we still allowing religious zealots to decide what should or shouldn’t be law in this country? And don’t tell me that the bible is the ultimate law because the bible was written by men who supposedly were under the “Holy Spirits” writing down for God what I guess he couldn’t because God didn’t have a number two pencil that day or something.

I know the world won’t change overnight but I also know that we can no longer allow ourselves (straight or gay) to be told to wait or be patient when we’re continually being treated like second class citizens. It happens time and time again, our money and energies assist in getting legislators in to office so it would seem that we are finally getting our seat at the table. But once they get into office, we discover that we’re at the kiddie table with a table leg cutting our circulation. Oh sure, we’re at the table but we’re not at THE table. And yet the politicians can still look us in the face and say, “Well, just be thankful you’re finally at the table, isn’t that great?” “Fuck NO!” would be my response.

I get that health care is a very important issue but by the time everyone compromises and the Richie Rich doctors, insurance and drug companies finish threatening the politicians to no longer support their campaigns unless they vote the way they want I’m afraid that we’ll come out with some watered down limping program that’s obsolete before it begins. Why not make some time to do some humanitarian work at home, Mr. Obama? Maybe God didn’t have a number two pencil but you have an opportunity to show that a pen is mightier than the prejudices this country was founded on and continues to operate under.

Dear Mr. Obama, I know I’m just one of the “huddle masses yearning to breathe free” and I don’t expect miracles right away but I’d appreciate it if you’d get legisHATEon off the books sooner than later. Laws like DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell have no place in our country. They serve no purpose other than to give people a legal reason to hate and discriminate against one another. The longer you leave these laws on the books the more responsible you become for not creating real change as you promised in your campaign. So do us a favor and stop Defense of Assholes with small minds and get rid of the Defense Of Marriage Act now. DOMA really DOA – Don’t Get Me Started!

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How To Talk Sports For Gays Who Don’t Know – Don’t Get Me Started!

I admit it, I am one of those gays. I’m from the old school of gays who never threw a football, never made it around the track (except walking with the fat kids in the back) and I even cut a deal with my seventh grade PE coach that if I found something else to do during his class for the year and not get in trouble that he would give me an A – deal made, deal kept. So I know nothing about any of the teams, what they’re doing, how they’re doing in the playoffs or anything else. That said there are days when I don’t feel like doing the hair thing so I stick a baseball cap on. Now my head wasn’t made for baseball hats, in fact the only hat that ever looked good on me was Mousketeer ears and since I never became a Mousketeer I realized that hats weren’t really for me. However, I had to have at least one baseball cap for those days when the hair wasn’t presentable and I wanted to go to Starbucks because let’s face it, wearing Mousketeer ears out at my age just makes people clutch their children a little closer and pointing and laughing ensues. Enter the New York Yankees cap from Target. I didn’t really think about the Yankees when I bought the cap I only thought that it looked decent enough on me and that it reminded me of New York (which more often than not I miss living two hours away from now that I live on the west coast). So it’s always a surprise to me when someone asks me a Yankee related question. Then I remember the hat I’m wearing and I suddenly begin the tap dance that is never seen on any stage. How to talk sports for gays who don’t know – Don’t Get Me Started!

Now I know there are many gays out there who follow sports and they are completely disgusted that I would write about this, thinking that I’m doing everything I can to keep the much maligned gay stereotype alive but I’m not, I’m simply writing from my own experience, a gay who on occasion has been known to resemble the much maligned gay stereotype.

Usually when another guy looks at me and says, “Whaddya think their chances are?” I tend to think about one of the many reality television shows I watch with great shame. Do they mean a designer on Project Runway or America’s Best Dance Crew but then it dawns on me that they have noticed my hat and what they really want to talk about are the Yankees. What you discover is that most people are opening up this conversation to perhaps connect with another human being but more often than not, they’re doing it to give you their opinion. So the safest and most sure-fired response is, “I don’t know (shaking your head and looking down a bit and then back up at them) whadda YOU think their chances are?” If all goes perfectly this conversation times out to be exactly the amount of time you need to replace an awkward moment and for the person in front of them to be done with their transaction at Starbucks. The sports enthusiast then places their order, gives you a knowing head nod as they go to wait to get their coffee, you order and then act as if an email just came through of great importance so you engross yourself in your phone and by then they’ve left and your mission has been accomplished.

The above will work in most cases but sometimes there’s more of a delay or someone really wants to talk about it so you must be prepared with your keen gay powers of observation and do what we gays do best, become the gay chameleon. This happened the other day at the deli. I went up to the counter and ordered my pound of pastrami and there were about six guys who are always behind the counter and seem as though they must drive home to New Jersey every day instead of living in Las Vegas. However on this day it was a young kid who while he seemed more the New York type as he went to get the process started he looked at me and his eyes lit up. He then pointed to his cap (which was a Yankees cap) and then pointed to mine. Here’s the conversation:

Deli Boy: You from New York?

Me: No, Philadelphia.

Deli Boy: Hmm, Phillies what do you think of the Yankees so far?

Me: I don’t know, what do you think?

Deli Boy: Good start, they could do it again.

Me: Please, don’t jinx it.

Deli Man: Hey, yous guys talking Yankees? I’m the only one here who don’t go for the Yankees but I was born in Boston.

Me: Oh, then you have an excuse right?

Deli Man: Hell yeah. Sox fan all the way.

Me: Isn’t that something they do at the hospital when you’re born there, make you a Sox fan?

Deli Man 2: Yeah, they stamp it on the babies’ butts when they’re born there!

(All chuckle)

Transaction complete

This could be a sports conversation but it could just as easily be a musical theatre conversation between a straight guy who knows nothing about it and a gay who has so many opinions about it the rough draft of his book about it is sitting on his computer unfinished. Just remember that people want to give their opinions in most cases, not listen to yours so it takes very little to get them to tell you what you think about the topic they’re talking about and in the end everyone goes away feeling as though they connected with someone else and no one got hurt. And the best part about it was that the deli guys didn’t see me as a gay man (well, maybe not JUST a gay man) and in our own way we showed what tolerance for one another is all about as we did our acting exercise, me to be accepted and them to get a tip. How to talk sports for gays who don’t know – Don’t Get Me Started!

Michael Jackson And Elvis Have Left The Building – Don’t Get Me Started!

Michael Jackson and Elvis are both dead. That’s right, they are no longer among us living folk so while I appreciate their music and think they were both swell, they’re dead people, move on. I can’t watch one more supposed “entertainment” show going on and on about the two of them and how they’re connected by Lisa Marie. Ugh. Enough all ready. Michael Jackson and Elvis have left the building – Don’t Get Me Started!

What is that mysterious painting above Michael Jackson’s temporary crypt? What did his doctor know and not know? Why did Elvis like fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches? Why do any of us care? I get it, they were famous but they’re dead so please spare me the six hour mini-series of you re-creating their lives and what could, should or may have happened. Don’t spend hours and hours on the “entertainment” shows going over every single insignificant piece of their lives and the people around them as if everything and every moment of every one of their days and the days of the hanger-oners they had around them is so important. I don’t care that the doctor who drugged Michael Jackson owed child support or who the mother was of his “love child.” If he gave Jackson medicine he shouldn’t have then put him out of business and put him in prison and let’s move on, shall we?

It has gotten so ridiculous that now I hear that Sony is going to put a movie out in theaters of the Michael Jackson rehearsals with parts of it in 3-D. Entertainment Tonight actually used technology to show us what it “might” look like by superimposing Michael Jackson sort of zooming out in front of letters that said, “3-D.” Wow, Entertainment Tonight, I would have had no idea what that looked like if you hadn’t shown me and I do hope an overpaid graphic designer was paid millions for it because the cutting and pasting was impeccable.

And while we’re talking about things I don’t care about regarding the recent death of Jackson, his siblings need to just stop it too. I can’t watch one more incoherent interview with Jermaine Jackson (is this really the best that whole family could do for a spokesperson?) on Larry King with his eight zillion bracelets jingling and jangling in the breeze not answering any questions but continually repeating that Michael Jackson was the most important person in the world. It’s begun to feel like a new Jackson religion. They all worship him so much that they may as well get it over with and open the Church of Latter Day Michaels. Meanwhile, turns out that supposedly Jermaine had some choice words to say about his brother prior to his death in a “tell-all” book. But guess what? I don’t care about that either. I don’t care about LaToya Jackson finding a way to be on camera again because now she just looks like one of those dolls that are made from dried apples for the heads.

I get that Michael Jackson idolized Elvis (a lot of people did) because Elvis was in the same industry as Michael Jackson and was a trailblazer too but please don’t tell me that he was trying to get to Elvis by fucking Lisa Marie. First of all I have real doubts that they ever slept together and if they did I think that even in his drug induced state Michael Jackson had to have known that Elvis was dead and not hiding in his daughter’s vagina, right?

I get it. We all like to look at people and idolize them and think that we could be their friends or that perhaps someday we can be as famous or as rich as them. That’s also the reason that we love to tear them down as quickly as we build them up. Even though we put on a façade of being eternally devastated by the loss of an icon, we really love that Elvis was a drug addict who ended his life on a toilet. It makes him seem not so much better than us and we revel in that, don’t we?

There are plenty of celebrities that are no longer with us whom I would love to have met. There are a ton of performers who are dead that I listen to their music, watch their movies, etc., etc. But when they’re dead I think we all need to just back away from all the curiosity that supposedly killed the cat and let them rest in peace. Will I miss hearing of Michael Jackson’s latest antics? Sure. Will I miss hearing how he’s the King Of Pop but has financial difficulties to make me feel better about my own financial situation, sure. But I also believe in letting sleeping dogs and celebrities lie. Why can’t the media do the same? Michael Jackson and Elvis have left the building – Don’t Get Me Started!

Therapy Needed For Twitter Addicts – Don’t Get Me Started!

I am not on Twitter and I don’t expect myself to be on it anytime soon. I feel as though all the “social networking” sites are really just making all of us more and more anti-social but when Twitter went down last week there were many who apparently felt “naked” along with other emotions that normally are only associated with the mentally unstable. Therapy needed for Twitter addicts! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Look, I’m obviously a technophile, I have a website, I have the farchachta latest iPhone so I know what it’s like when a piece of technology that we’ve grown to rely on lets us down. I’ve spent the hours trying to figure out why my computer isn’t doing this or that. I’ve cursed the heavens as I look up and discover that my hard drive has crashed and I never had a backup (like my brother the IT professional told me time and time again to do). But come on kids, not being able to type in 140 characters about basically nothing important is a reason for a Xanax and an appointment with your therapist?

I venture to say that if you are that hung up on your Twitter account that perhaps it’s time to start de-Twittering yourself. As I said, I don’t even know how it works so I’m not sure how you get off the junk. Can you get a patch on your arm or do you need to go into a whole reparative therapy situation at a group home? Whatever it is I can tell you this, sending stuff out into cyberspace may be therapy in itself for you as a way of purging your recent frustration but I learned the hard way that once you put something out there you can never take it back. Much like that relationship with the person who promises to forgive but can never forget, you don’t know who has gotten a hold of what you typed into the Internet Universe nor what someone else is going to do with it.

I find it almost comical that in today’s society that Twitter has become the new PR agent. As Paula Abdul Tweets that she isn’t going back to American Idol, it immediately goes out onto the Internet Super Highway and then the supposed news sources pick it up from Twitter and report it. I wonder where the next stop is to this constant vomiting of information. When I joined MySpace I never understood why it was so great as it seemed to take forever to update anything so it took any fun or joy out of it for me. Account closed. When I joined Facebook it went faster and almost immediately everyone I thought I had gotten rid of in my life from high school found me and I found it fun until everyone started throwing imaginary snowballs at me, trying to “kidnap” me and then asking me to join their “mafia war.” I don’t know who these people are who have nothing to do all day that they spend their time constantly updating their status and playing farm games but I know this will never be me. Now it’s Twitter with its limit of the amount of characters you can use. So honestly, what is next? Is it a “social network” where you can only use one word as I’ve said before? If that’s the case I’m choosing the word nougat just because I like the sound of it. Am I living in a land that time forgot that I would rather communicate with someone on a phone or over a cup of coffee in person instead of writing on one another’s “walls?” Should I be using a quill because I have great aunts who are in their nineties who don’t know anything (or care anything about) the Internet so we correspond through the mail? (Or what is now disparagingly called “snail mail.” And can someone tell me what the snails ever did to anyone?)

Look, I’m glad that so many people have so much time on their hands that they can drive cars, text, talk on the phone and kill people left and right all at the same time by their reckless inability to pay attention to what the hell they’re doing but come on people, at the risk of sounding like your parent, isn’t there something more useful you could be doing with your time? Go feed the homeless or reconnect with someone that you stop talking to and can’t even remember why. Do something that actually enriches yourself or someone else. It’s not so much technology taking over our world as much as it is us giving our lives over to technology.

And most importantly, let’s all just take a moment and breathe shall we? No one is going to die because Twitter goes down, in fact is there anything really important going on there that simply HAS to be published? I think not. But if your USB ports and your panties got in a wad over the recent Twitter situation then join a group for therapy needed for Twitter addicts! – Don’t Get Me Started!

The Health Care Anger – Don’t Get Me Started!

As I watch CNN and read certain articles online I keep coming back to the same thought. I wonder if we’re all really as upset as the media has painted us regarding Health Care reform in the US or if some political mechanism somewhere is using people like pawns, a means, to get to their end. Conspiracy? I’m no Oliver Stone but it does seem as if these protests and the anger are all staged and that although there may be no script, it definitely seems as though there is an outline. The Health Care anger – Don’t Get Me Started!

I don’t know how anyone can be surprised (and not disgusted) by the fact that we are supposedly one of the richest countries in the world and yet we have no universal health care. There are people turned away every day from getting care because of not having insurance. It’s all so shocking to me that you could show up at a hospital dying and they could turn you away because you didn’t have insurance or the “right kind” of insurance where the hospital can triple bill and make a fortune off of you so you’re turned away. I don’t get it. Is it in the Hippocratic Oath somewhere that physicians will only heal those with the proper insurance and fourteen pieces of ID? Don’t get me wrong there’s more blame to go around than to just the doctors, the patients who are so hoping to have a sponge left in them so they can sue are morons too. Then you add the predatory drug companies and insurance companies and what you have is a vicious cycle that is designed to keep you jumping through hoops until you finally get so tired that you just close your eyes at night and hope you still have a leg in the morning.

If you’ve ever had to deal with insurance companies I don’t know how you couldn’t want someone to step in and start regulating things in order to ensure that at least there is some fairness to the process. I defy anyone to call their insurance provider and not have your call forwarded to at least two departments, add in your wait time and the minimum of two times when you’ll be hung up on and have to call back and what you have is a very expensive pain in the ass. Plus you’re always at the mercy of the person that is on the other end of the phone who incidentally gets bonuses for denying you coverage and/or service. Wow, that sounds like a system that’s working great, no need for the government to step in (he said, eyes rolling very far back into his head).

So take my anger and multiply it times the many people who are out of work, the people who want to become famous and then have a town hall meeting you put on television and YouTube. Put that all together and it doesn’t spell “Mother” like the old song used to say, it spells, “Motherf#@cker!” You can’t possibly look at these things and not think that the people who brought us Joe the Plumber aren’t involved somewhere.  The recipe appears to be the same. You take a nation of angry people, out of work people and you show them how a “normal” guy ends up making money and going all over the world being interviewed simply for spouting an uneducated opinion and then you see an ad for a town hall meeting in your city. It makes it seem as though you’d be crazy NOT to go to one of these things, make a fuss and hope you become an overnight sensation. Because the old adage is true that opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.

I don’t have any answers, I’ll leave that to the more educated and informed but I do know that insurance seems to be like buying a plane ticket, no one paid the same fare and yet you’re all in it together going to the same place (in the case of insurance, we’re going to our death). And just like the difference in airfare that has never made sense to me, I don’t get why people are turned down for insurance or why there isn’t some sort of standard for people of certain height, weight, age or whatever instead of allowing coverage premiums to be decided by how many people are in your plan, or what your pre-existing condition might be. Frankly I’m convinced that when you get insurance there’s someone on the other end of the phone that spins a large wheel and wherever it stops that’s what you pay (that would be the clicking sound you hear while you’re on with the phone with them) and then there’s some lawyer in the back writing fine print using a lot of jargon you won’t understand to tell you why it all makes sense.

I was watching today and some woman actually stood up and said we had the greatest health care system in the world. Where has she been? Where is she living? And what, is her husband a senator and that’s why she has such great coverage? I get the anger over insurance but sometimes I think we’re all the same, afraid to change but bitching hoping someone else will make the change for us. (Which wouldn’t be so bad if anyone in our country knew how to give change for a dollar let alone giving life changes a try.)The thing is that the more the media covers it the more there seems to be a cast of characters handpicked to do the bidding of someone out there who just wants to see any reform fail. Can you say drug companies? Can you say insurance companies? Can you say politicos yearning to get camera time? Someone do me a favor and just wake me when the politics are done and the laws are in place. The Health Care anger – Don’t Get Me Started!

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How Jon Gosselin Killed Ed Hardy! – Don’t Get Me Started!

I’m proud to say that I never got wrapped up in the Ed Hardy phenomenon. The clothing line that is designed and owned by Christian Audigier never attracted me. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I never had the desire to wear something that looks like a tattoo encrusted by some crazed Bedazzler person got a hold of it but for whatever the reason I don’t own any of his stuff. That said, I know that about four years ago it was the latest rage and craze which means that it has finally been found by the masses. Mr. Audigier even has a nightclub here in Vegas that he designed and there’s no doubt that he is a designer that a lot of people respect and like but recently the Ed Hardy brand has gone too wide and too far. It appears on things like candles, cell phones and more. It seems as though this was the glitter that was not gay to straight guys as you can hardly go anywhere without seeing some straight guy in a sequin encrusted Ed Hardy shirt anymore. I remember a few seasons ago seeing Jon Gosselin on TLC’s Jon and Kate Plus Eight wearing a baseball hat then a shirt all with the Ed Hardy name on it and I thought it was cool that Mr. Suburban Dad was trying to be fashion forward but with his recent antics and even a trip on the Audigier yacht with a gal pal, I think that it’s finally official. What happens to most cool brands is that in a matter of years it gets mass produced and loses it’s cool but in the case of Ed Hardy, it had an executioner. How Jon Gosselin killed Ed Hardy! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Although Jon Gosselin claims that he never wanted the spotlight, it would appear that he is reveling in it now that he doesn’t have eight kids and a wife (with a misguided hairstyle) in tow. He’s seen here and there and always in front of the camera while granting interviews telling how misunderstood he is all the while sporting a different gal pal on his arm at each sighting. The thing that really ended it for me was when about a month ago he was on the Audigier yacht and made the announcement that he would be creating a kids clothing line with Audigier and that his kids would be the models for it. Can you say exploitation Mr. Gosselin?

Now I know that some of you are saying that it’s no big deal and that Gosselin should be able to do whatever he wants. True, I’ve always thought I was one of those live and let live kind of people but you see I don’t care who Gosselin is shtooping, or that he’s making his kids models to continue to afford his lifestyle and new Manhattan bachelor pad, what I’m talking about is how he’s killing the Ed Hardy brand. And how is he doing it? He’s doing it by walking around looking as if Mr. Audigier threw up on him. (See photo)

Here’s some fashion advice that is sure to be a revelation to some and will help the rest of us to not have to look at this particular fashion faux pas made over and over again by both women and men. It’s okay to wear a designer piece but don’t outfit yourself head to toe in one designer. You no longer look like you’re making a fashion statement, you look like a walking billboard for the brand. Gosselin is a perfect example from his Ed Hardy hat to his Ed Hardy shoes it’s all a bit too much.  The idea behind style is that every one of us has the ability create our own unique style and footprint but when you buy everything on the mannequin and only ever wear those pieces together you look like the rest of the fashion don’ts who bought it and wear it the same way. I’ve no doubt some emaciated gay somewhere put those pieces together on the mannequin and would be flattered to know that you love his sense of style but that’s his sense of style and not yours.

So here’s my suggestion, be daring and try different designers and pieces with different stuff in your wardrobe. Don’t be confined by labels or anything else. And always wear what looks good on you. Just because a supposed “good” designer made it doesn’t mean it’s right for you or that any of us want to see you sporting it. Half of what designers create only looks good on the size 0 models and never gets seen off a runway anywhere anyway. And to you celebrities and mock-celebs (like Jon Gosselin) do the world a favor and stop painting yourself head to toe in one designer, will ya? How Jon Gosselin killed Ed Hardy! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Looking At The World Through Coffee Colored Glasses – Don’t Get Me Started!

I never wanted to be one of those people (well, let me clarify, I never wanted to be seen as one of those people) you know, the type that reach for a cigarette from their nightstand the minute they wake up, the people who “shush” you before they’ve had their morning cup of coffee, the type that always seemed to me that used these “crutches” as a way to excuse their bad behavior or weakness for things that they really didn’t need at all (in my opinion). But then it happened, I went a Saturday without coffee and from what I can remember of that day (which is precious little) I can only say that from now on I’ll be looking at the world through coffee colored glasses – Don’t Get Me Started!

I’ve gone without coffee before and it didn’t affect me in the least. I boasted that I was not one of those people who needed to have a beverage in the morning to make them human. I felt sure that I was impervious to the coffee addiction that had gripped Americans to stand in line, making up ridiculous drinks that ten years ago we’d never even heard of. Does anyone really know what a macchiato translates to or did Starbucks just make up words and the rest of us went along with it for the sake of keeping up with whatever our co-workers had in their cup? However it happened, it’s happened and as I went from the higher caloric drinks where you couldn’t even taste the coffee, I have now upped the caffeine, trading the calories for four shots of espresso over ice in the morning with a splash of soy milk. As I write this I see that what I drink in the morning is probably what they give people who are about to be shot out of a cannon.

I got up on Saturday morning and as I made my omelet I noticed a dull ache right over my eyes. I went through my Jewish hypochondriac list and once I’d ruled out the brain aneurysm I figured that perhaps it was allergies or maybe a lack of sleep that I should have gotten the night before. As I ate my breakfast and turned on the television only to find out that I had hit the old movie jackpot with a day full of Bette Davis movies, I went from sitting on the couch to reclining on the couch to not really remembering much but a gun shot at one point and some dramatic music by Max Steiner. As I tossed and turned on the sofa waking to learn that Bette Davis was no longer Jezebel and was now parading around as a dance hall girl with Humphrey Bogart as the DA I fell asleep once more only to wake up hours later to find Bette now a playgirl with all the money in the world, Humphrey Bogart was now the keeper of her horses and she was about to die from an aneurysm type illness. How perfect as I grabbed my forehead and began massaging it, maybe I had that aneurysm after all. The rest of the afternoon is a blur of sleep and black and white dreams.

As if some sort of bad dream, I awoke to discover that it was now five in the afternoon. I wasn’t sure where the day went but wherever it had gone it didn’t take my dull aching throbbing headache with it. I decided that perhaps I just hadn’t gotten the right kind of sleep because I was lying on the sofa. Off to the bed I went for an hour or so of sleep.

I woke up at 8pm not knowing if it was day or night, that awful feeling you have in your stomach when you realize that life has completely passed you by and that you’ve lost one of those precious days that was to be owned by you filled with productive deeds.

I squinted as we had dinner around 11:30pm and felt sick to my stomach as I squinted to see what was on my plate, by 1:00am I was back in bed and as I drifted off to sleep I heard myself chanting to myself a line similar to Scarlett’s from Gone With The Wind, “As God as my witness, I’ll never go with coffee again.” Sunday morning I awoke to find that the headache had gone but as I threw on clothes and my baseball cap, I allowed myself to drive without thought to the one place that might allow me to have a day completely unlike the one before, Starbucks. Ah peace, the world looked like a world I recognized, that grass was green and the sky was blue. Alas, I was once again looking at the world through coffee colored glasses – Don’t Get Me Started!

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It Can’t Be Me, It Must Be You! – Don’t Get Me Started!

This week I had the opportunity to go to a gay soirée of sorts. One of the established clubs in town has decided to do a “gay night” every Tuesday and this was the launch for it. As someone who is not on the party or club circuit at all, going out on a Tuesday at 11pm was feat enough but as I watched the crowd and mingled amongst them I realized that I no longer had the apprehensions I had as a young gay man when I went to a club of this sort, instead I decided it can’t be me, it must be you! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Funny how your perspective changes as you grow older (and supposedly wiser) isn’t it? Before I even took the elevator up I had that old feeling in the pit of my stomach that I haven’t had in years. You know the whole, did I have the right shirt on, would it be dark enough inside to make me look thin? All the baggage that I used to lug around with me to every event I went to as a young gay man. As I approached the entry there was a group of six women who were pleading with the man behind the velvet rope to let them in. I instantly realized that the women in front of me were from out of town and had no idea about the launch of “gay night” and as they flirted to get the bouncer to let them in (even though they were letting anyone in with the $5 cover charge) I thought these girls from Idaho have no idea what’s waiting for them upstairs. They got in. As we gave our name to the Tuesday night bouncer (more like a bouncer in training as he wasn’t there on one of the good nights I can only imagine that he was like a bar back who was in training to be a bartender) he found us on the list and the velvet rope was un-tethered to allow us to get to the elevator that would take us upstairs to the club. Before the elevator doors could close a boy who looked about fifteen entered the elevator with us. As the doors closed I realized this club had one thing going for it, the back of the elevator doors were mirrored so that you could do a last minute vanity check as you zoomed to the highest floor in the hotel with your ears popping to enter the place where the supposed elite (and now gay) meet.

As the doors opened there were two men who seemed to be waiting to greet people and the boy who had been busy checking himself out in the mirror of the elevator doors and talked nervously about the fact that he didn’t think he’d get in because he was wearing a baseball cap (leather)as we ascended suddenly became the swishiest queen in the land, “Hey Girl” he exclaimed with one arm up like he was either saluting Hitler or waving to fans from his convertible in a parade. We skated past the boy/boy welcome embrace and entered.

After my eyes adjusted I could see that I don’t think the gay night launch was as successful as they had wanted it to be. I think there were about forty to fifty people and as we went to the bar and got our drinks I would have to say that the surroundings were beautiful but who could look at that with all the people scenery about? I have always enjoyed watching people. I love to see who hangs out with whom and I find it interesting that there are certain groupings that appear to be the same people over and over again with the exception of a few of their facial features. You know what I’m talking about, there were the two really tall boys with their chubby girl friend tagging along behind. This is a group you see everywhere, the two boys and the girl who was in love with one of them in high school and they’ve remained best friends. She has no idea why she hasn’t found a man at thirty but if she had any sense (or real friends) they’d tell her that devoting her life to her homosexual friend has made her fit for no one other than a cat. There was the older gay couple who seemed as though every boy who passed might be the thing that put some spark back into their relationship if they could get him drunk enough to get him to go home with them tonight. There was the guy in the kilt. There were the two lesbians on one of the couches in the corner, wondering where all the other lesbians were but being good sports about being the only lesbians at this shindig. There was the gaggle of gays, that group of about five or six boys who walk around together in a pack hoping there’s safety in numbers and each one hoping that they might be able to sneak away from the pack at some point and find someone who spends more than ten minutes with them in a stall in the men’s room. There was the “couple” this is the gay couple that is either making out or walking about the place hand in hand (usually with one seemingly leading the other one about, holding his hand, looking as though he’s dragging him back to his cave or something) that possessive public display of affection type that will cause the relationship to always end in tragedy. (Gay or straight, these relationships always end ugly.) There’s the no eye contact guy. He is by himself with his Justin Timberlake from three years ago porkpie hat on, walking around not making eye contact with anyone and convinced everyone’s looking at him and wanting him. There’s the eye contact guy who is alone and trying to make eye contact with everyone passing by in hopes of either making a love connection or just finding someone to talk to so no one will know he’s alone. There are the four transitioning to fully developed transgender folk who look like one of those evolution posters showing man starting out as an ape and ending looking like a well developed cave man. And of course there are the loud queens who preen and float about being a little too loud to cover up how alone they feel.

As I looked at this parade that went by me, I didn’t judge it, I didn’t feel superior, I just felt that they were all part of the mixture that creates the GLBT community and I wondered if I ever fit into it or did today. I no longer was jealous of the fabulously muscled boys and the attention that they seemed to receive from everyone nor did I wish that I had been born with more chiseled features. I was able to just look at this display knowing I was going home in an hour or so to the man I’ve shared my life with for the last twenty or so years and my cats. Safe in the realization that if someone did notice me in the crowd and had any disparaging remarks to make about me that it can’t be me, it must be you! – Don’t Get Me Started!

How Gay Sluts Get So Many Men – Don’t Get Me Started!

I always wondered just what my life would have been like if I had been more of a slut. Although I talked a good game at an early age (filled with innuendo and double entendre) I really didn’t know what any of it meant I just knew it got a reaction if I said it or raised an eyebrow when I said it. And as I’ve always been an attention whore, I loved every minute of it. The fact was that I had a mouth like a sewer (dirty and catching all sorts of debris). One person would tell me in my early twenties, “You are jaded beyond your years.” When the truth of the matter was that I wasn’t jaded, wasn’t experienced, I was just trying to make people laugh. I remember the first man I was with, it was right before the big moment and I said, “I’ve never done this before.” Well, it set him back a bit but then he proceeded with the vigor normally only associated with a bear (not “that” kind of bear, boys) (or Jew) eating a lox. He was very into the whole scene, so much so that I often thought of using the line again. No doubt people have told say the first six people they’ve been with that they’re the first, right? It sort of makes you seem like one of the characters from Little House on the Prairie or something, complete with bonnet and innocent look in your eyes. (I’m just now wondering if there’s a limit to the amount of partners you can lie to about them being your first. Is that number one? Three? Or Three Million? How many did you tell they were the first?) Anyway, recently in a conversation with a pal we began talking about sluts, man whores, whatever you want to call them and what I discovered was that while I’ve always thought that you had to be some big handsome thing to be a slut the truth of the matter is that you just have to ask. How gay sluts get so many men – Don’t Get Me Started!

Let’s just say I know someone who falls into the slut category (okay maybe more than one). I describe the “slut category” as when you’ve slept with more people than you will see on an average subway train at rush hour on any given day. I don’t hold any judgment in fact I will applaud you and love you all the more for it because you’re allowing yourself to live life to the fullest without regrets or concerns over what some people may think. (But by all means, practice safe sex) It seems whenever a gay man tells you about having sex with someone who they’re not really emotionally involved with they’ll tell you, “He had the biggest cock you’ve ever seen.” As if that somehow is a reason to have had sex with a complete stranger. (Maybe it’s like saying you had to climb Mount Everest because it’s so tall?) I don’t know where this strange breed of men with the “largest cocks ever” live (except on the Internet) but the sluts I know seem to find the one man with the largest dick in the world wherever they go (according to the sluts and I must say from some of the photos I’ve seen they aren’t lying…much). The thing is that while the slut may be attractive, for the most part I don’t think any photographers are beating down their door to make them a model. So I began to wonder how they got Juan (the bodybuilder from Cancun), Bjorn (the model from Brussels) or Tony (the personal trainer from West Hollywood) to name a few. These guys were all stunning examples of manliness with their bulging biceps, calves bigger than my waist and foreheads that you could set tea on (no doubt from the steroids). So how do they do it? How do the a little above average looking sluts get all these men? The answer my friends is not blowing in the wind, the answer is that they asked them. Yes, you read that right. I think it’s much like an actor going on tons of auditions and getting one job. The sluts must get turned down on occasion but by in large, they take whatever they want home (or to the alley) by simply asking them if they want to. Now of course the person saying yes in most cases is probably a slut too but isn’t it great to know that you don’t have to look like Adonis to get one for twenty minutes? That’s right, there’s the secret of being a slut and finding a partner for the moment…you just have to ask. Someone once told me that you never get anything in life if you don’t ask for it and apparently that applies here as well.  

I’m sure the same can be said for straight, female and male sluts too but since I’ve known less of them I didn’t really think I could speak as an authority as much as I could for the gay males I know who are sluts. I haven’t had sex with anyone but my partner of twenty-one years for the past twenty-one years and I couldn’t ever imagine having to be “on the market” again at my age, size and standards but it’s somehow great to know that if I ever did want to become a slut it wouldn’t involve changing me as much as it would be about changing my approach – no more having to be witty or buy the drinks, all I’d have to do is ask. (True, I may have to ask a thousand to get one but then again, if sluts can do it so can I, right?) How gay sluts get so many men – Don’t Get Me Started!

The World Is Full Of Cut And Pasters! – Don’t Get Me Started!

The more I live the more I realize that I’m not the only lazy person in the world. I used to think that my little bit of procrastination here and a weekend spent on the couch there was something to be embarrassed about. Not that I wanted to change it but I knew from being a Jew that I should feel guilty about it. As the office gang came in on Monday mornings talking about their weekend kayaking, I had little to add to the conversation. Sure sometimes I might try to make something up but always in the back of my mind was the image of my fat ass on the sofa with my hand continually stuffed into a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints cookies. But recently the tide has turned. That’s right I’ve discovered that while there are some who are living the tri-athlete life a lot of people are doing very little and when pressed they tend to do what they do with documents, they cut and paste from different things that they’ve done in their life to create the document that is their life. The world is full of cut and pasters! – Don’t Get Me Started!

When I was doing theatre there was a guy who whenever you met up with him would begin telling you his current resume. We called him “the walking resume guy.” Now, this was in the days before downloading but since I’m bringing this whole blog into this century, for those of you riding the technological wave with me, today he would now be known as “resume download guy.” And because no matter how advanced things get there are certain things you shouldn’t do, there was also another guy who auditioned for me once that had a role on his resume on a show that I just happened to have been the assistant choreographer on. It was across the country from where the show was so I’m sure he thought he was safe in putting that he had the lead when in fact he was never in the show but was in a parade version of the show and was in the ensemble. I saw an old black and white movie once where two women who obviously don’t like one another meet on the street. From under their veiled hats they look at one another and speak,

Woman 1: My, my, what a small world

Woman 2: Positively stuffy!

The world is small and the world of theatre is even smaller so it’s best not to lie or paste something into your resume that you’re cutting from someone else’s.

As society has become more advanced so has the technology and I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. I don’t know that the person who copies someone else’s document and forwards it knows that all you have to do is right click on it, go to properties and you can see (in most cases) who really authored the document. When I was in high school a friend of mine had typing class but he never did his homework. We would go around looking for typing papers that we could trim the top off of so that he could type his name on it. (To this day he doesn’t know how to type and he blames me.)

Although it sounds like an old cliché it’s true. In most cases when you take a shortcut approach to life you either run the boat aground, get even more lost than you were to begin with or end up missing something. I was awful at math in school so I would get the answers from friends and then just fill them in. The paper always came back with the same note on it, “Show your work.” I thought it didn’t matter how I got the right answer as long as I got the right answer. I was wrong. As I get older (and maybe a little wiser) I discovered that I’m proud that I’m not a cut and paster (someone who always takes the easy way out or begs, borrows and steals from other people to get ahead). Nope, I’m proud of the lines on my face and the gray hair because really it’s just showing my work, right? The world is full of cut and pasters! – Don’t Get Me Started!

How Multi-Tasking Made Me Fat – Don’t Get Me Started!

It was a long time coming but I think I finally figured it all out. That’s right, you don’t need to make yourself crazier than you all ready are if you’re like me. You see as life began running me more and more ragged, I began developing the multi-tasking gene. I’ve built up my stamina and now I can take on about seven or so tasks simultaneously. (True, I’m not sure that the final results on each of the projects will come out the same quality but the point is that I can do a lot at the same time.) Recently trying to eat a meal with some friends and text with my testicles (so as to not appear rude but to get a message to someone about something I’d just thought of and needed to let them know right away) all the while thinking about what was for dessert, whether or not I should set up a time for us to have dinner again the following week, what the brand of jeans was that I saw that guy wearing today and would they look good on me, it dawned on me (yes, I had that many ideas going on at once and I was still smiling and nodding in an almost listening fashion to my friend). It dawned on me that much like my life, while I’m eating what I’m eating right now I’m really not tasting it at all because I’m thinking about the next thing I’m going to eat and the thing after that. How multi-tasking made me fat! – Don’t Get Me Started!

In my family we’re always thinking about the next meal. I’m not sure if it’s a Jewish thing or what but at breakfast you’re discussing lunch, lunch you’re talking about dinner and at dinner you’re talking about dessert and what’s for breakfast tomorrow. I don’t know why but it has always been that way in my family. I guess it gave us something to talk about over our meal and if you go by the logic that the most logical thing to talk about while eating is food then I guess it all makes sense. Although my family has never been at a loss for words at any time so it could be that we just like talking about food. I dunno.

Next add in my work life. I am an Executive Assistant in my current life and as such you must meet the demands of getting everything for everyone in a matter of seconds, so you multi-task out of necessity. Oh sure, they could probably wait a few seconds but as an assistant you’re constantly running at a pace similar to an Olympic athlete except you don’t get the matchy match sweat suit and a stadium of people cheering for you when you’ve managed to fix the copier, re-boot someone’s computer and deal with an irate person on the phone all at the same time.

I always blamed Sesame Street for my short attention span. You see, I grew up with Sesame Street (when it first came on in the 60’s our next door neighbor called my mother and told her, “Lois, don’t turn on PBS. They have a kids’ show where negros are living on the same street with whites.” – My mother never stopped us from watching the show and frankly my father was much more concerned about me watching Mr. Rogers who one day took off his socks and shoes and was dangling his feet in a kiddie pool in his “backyard” than he ever was concerned about Sesame Street.) The thing about Sesame Street was that it accelerated the way we took in information, right? Instead of someone repeating a thousand times the order of numbers 1 through 10 in a slow meticulous fashion, it was suddenly a bunch of cartoon guys opening their coats while the soundtrack blared and you heard, “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten” as fast as lightning. Then it was on to Oscar in his garbage can. Then to the lady bugs at the lady bug picnic. (“And they all sat around and told knock, knock jokes!”)The faster the information came in the faster we started to process information until finally if someone takes more than a sentence to get something out I’m completely bored.

So add all of it together and I think I may have the secret to my sagging gut. I’m eating foods at the speed of lightning, all the while thinking about six hundred other things I need to do, while also sending an email or watching something on Tivo. No wonder I have no idea what I just ate or what it tasted like. No wonder I eat until the plate is empty or I tip over like a beached whale. Like any important project, the less attention to detail you give it, the crappier it turns out. And such is the case with my body. I’ve paid it very little attention and it has repaid me by transforming into something I don’t even recognize.

So I’ve decided to make a change and I encourage you to come along with me for the ride. I’ve never known what “undivided attention” was but I’m going to train myself to be able to do it the same way I trained myself to not give all of my attention to any one thing. I’m going to look at the food (so that maybe I can tell someone what it was I ate afterward) and I’m going to taste each bite too.  Yes, it’s that simple. I’m going to take the same amount of time to eat that I take writing, reading and re-reading a blog post, editing all the way before I post it. It can sometimes take me an hour to write one post and get it shaped exactly the way I like it while I can’t remember ever taking longer than fifteen minutes to eat unless it was in a restaurant where they served each course designed to be a “dining experience” (and I was always impatient that the next course wasn’t coming fast enough). And suddenly the words to the song, “Feeling Groovy” are going through my head, “Slow down, you move too fast, gotta make the morning last just kickin’ down the cobblestones, looking for fun and feeling groovy.” How multi-tasking made me fat! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Some People Are Just Dicks! – Don’t Get Me Started!

I don’t think the statement above is any sort of real earth shattering thing, let’s face it, we’ve all known people who were less than a delight to be around but I had my car washed yesterday and as I sat and watched the workers it dawned on me that some people are just dicks! – Don’t Get Me Started!

Have you ever had a boss who was so worried about being the boss he was a complete dick? Usually these are the bosses you have at your first through sixth job in life who is not much older than you but feels the need to compensate by continually threatening you and letting you know that he’s in charge. (I’m sure there are women bosses who are dicks too but I’ve never encountered one of those so I can’t speak to it.) It’s about 110 degrees here in Vegas so I don’t care how you slice it, the guys working at a car wash are exposed to the elements all day and God bless them for doing it. There was this guy who appeared to be in his mid-fifties and I can only assume he was the boss because he had a different colored polo shirt on but more telling was the way he treated everyone else. I saw one of the guys who was wiping down one of the cars sheepishly ask this guy for a bottle of something that he was out of and after the “boss” told him to get it for himself, the employee asked again, stating that they weren’t normally allowed in the closet where the stuff was kept and he didn’t want to break the rules. The guy wiping down the car was in his twenties but you could see that he was so subservient (most likely to keep his job) that it made me really uncomfortable. As the boss told him again to get it himself, I observed the boss going around and basically terrorizing every single person who was wiping down a car, strutting with his chest and gut (which came out farther than his chest) out shouting the orders. It made me sick.

I’ve learned enough about people to know that there are some people who can only feel powerful if they take away someone else’s or try to break their spirit but my God, when you’re faced with it like I was I just felt ill. I didn’t know what I could do or say so I did what I always do, I over-tipped the guy wiping down my car. But it wasn’t just the bossman who was an ass. I watched as women and men alike treated these people who were wiping down their cars like some sort of servant. Showing them spots they missed while rolling their eyes and tapping their feet at the guys who had been out there since 8 am wiping down cars. Look, I get it that it’s their job but would it kill any of us to be a little nicer? It just seems to me that we’re all about ten minutes away from wiping down cars in the current economic situation and a little kindness could go a long way.

I’m no saint, I have little patience and I can be a real pain in the ass about certain things but when it comes to people I usually give everyone the benefit of the doubt before I pull out the ugly side of Scott. I’ve been blessed in a way because I grew up with low self esteem and didn’t really come into my own until I hit my forties. So I always ate the sandwich that was made wrong, never complaining to the person who made it wrong (just to my friends and to myself). Now I send the sandwich back and know that the person who put in the order probably just got it wrong and that hopefully the cook isn’t going to hate me for it and pee in it or something. It’s really not a big deal but if you treat everyone like crap then it becomes a big deal. Have you ever been to dinner with someone who was a dick? Sure you have, they are condescending to the server and they’re so busy telling you what’s wrong with everything in order to make themselves feel superior that I don’t know what pleasure they derive but they must on some weird level. Again, all I can do is over tip.

And sometimes it isn’t the boss at all that is the dick. I go into Walmart almost every morning to get soda, water, etc. for the office. There are my cashiers who I’ve grown to know and they know me. Well one morning I walked up to the checkout to find a woman I’d never seen before in her late fifties dressed to the nines behind the cashier stand. We made some trivial conversation as she was ringing up my items and somehow I mentioned that I was buying stuff for the office. She immediately began a tirade about how she used to work in a real estate office making tons of money until they closed the office and now she was stuck at Walmart with all these lowlife people working here, etc. She went on quite the toot (especially considering this was the first time we had seen one another). I get that she’s angry about her situation but why is it that there’s a certain type of person who feels the only way they can feel better about themselves is to bring someone else down? (Are you listening Perez Hilton and the media in general?) I’ve got an idea, let’s be nicer to one another and only make fun of people who dress funny, okay? Some people are just dicks! – Don’t Get Me Started!