I can’t past the nifty results code here, though. Nope. Not and have it work.

This has been fun.

I’m thinking I’ll migrate the posts back to the old digs. The old digs pissed me off from time to time, but I could paste code there.

Functionality… I’m totally NOT the sort who fusses over functionality. I’m not. It shall not be me that whines over the lack of bells and whistles and the latest new thingamabob. I’m not like that.

But sometimes shit doesn’t work.

So I’m at the bakery and I’m doing things to dough. I’m not baking, because I’m not at all a baker. Bakers bake and I don’t do that. I do things to dough. There is a baker… he bakes the dough after I’ve done things to it. Whatever.

And Boopsie comes rolling through. He does that. It’s odd that he should do that — come rolling through the bakery — but it’s part of his charm.

“Oh… just kill me now, Somebody.”

Seems Boopsie is not having a good day.

“What ails you, Boopsie?” says I.

I say this because it is pretty much required. Not so much that it’s socially expected (and it is) but because Boopsie really will piss and moan until his complaints reach an intolerable crescendo that obliges someone to make just such an inquiry. Boopsie is like that (as are a shockingly large number of people) and I find it’s best to just avoid the unpleasantness and ask.

I don’t do it because I’m nice. That’s a vicious calumny. I’m not at all nice. I fake it fairly well, however.

“I hate men,” declares Boopsie.

Ah.

Men.

Being one of those, I can quite safely vouch for our less than enjoyable aspects. We have them. Saying “I hate men” isn’t entirely daft… it’s just overly petulant.

Really.

As a man, I can also vouch for our over-all cuddlyness and general charm. We can be sweet. We’re like dogs that way: cuddly, charming, can be sweet. You wouldn’t really want to be without us but we really will pee on the couch or chew up the slippers or otherwise provoke you into screaming “I hate men.”

Whatever.

Boopsie, you may recall, “needs” a boyfriend. He does. He said so just two weeks ago or so. Scroll down past the pretty pink orchid and see if I’m wrong. (I’m just not, you know.)

Boopsie, you may recall, satisfied this “need” for a boyfriend. He did. He did so by deciding that breathing and male were the only two pertinent qualifications for being a boyfriend.

Yeah.

And now Boopsie has had the occasion to “hate” men.

I’m going to say it now: Boopsie is quite mad. He’s nutty, bonkers, not right in the head. Tetched, loonie, quite possibly psycho also come to mind. Boopsie is in good company, I fear. Some days it seems to me that everyone is quite insane.

That does not at all auger well for me. No. But then I quite like men. They’re cuddly, charming, are really good at scratching certain itches… all around handy things. They also don’t puke as much as dogs do… as a general rule with copious exceptions.

“Boopsie,” says I. “This boyfriend of yours… is he still breathing, is he still male?”

“I should have specified that he not be an asshole,” Boopsie says.

“Well, decide where men who aren’t assholes are likely to be found and then go there,” says I.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that,” says I. “But really, Boopsie… consider adding literate to the job description. Consider adding a great many things you really do find to be required. You can’t just decide that a breathing male is adequate and then complain about how breathing males are inadequate. It’s cruel.”

“I’m cruel? Me?” shrieks Boopsie.

Oh yes.

No?

Well… that was clever of you.

In other news, my friend (one of them, anyway) came bouncing into the bakery recently. He did.

“Guess what, Feral. Guess, guess guess.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” says I. Nope. I really couldn’t, either.

Then the other shoe falls. Ker-thump.

“I got a boyfriend!”

Oh what fresh gay hell is this, now? That’s what I’m thinking. It’s not at all what I said (not that I’m not prone to yelling just that at the top of my lungs because I am) but it is what I thought. “How special,” says I.

“It is, you know,” the friend says in all seriousness.

Now… this would be the self-same friend who ejaculated that he needed a boyfriend not that long ago… the one who seemed oblivious to the notion that one might (just might) have to actually do something to make that happen.

“Usually boyfriend shopping takes somewhat longer,” says I. “All serious shopping takes somewhat longer. Deciding on a pair of shoes takes longer, fer fuck’s sake.”

“I just did what you said to do,” says he. “It worked, too.”

“Oh… I know it works. My not-at-all-patented formula for boyfriend hunting most assuredly works. I’m just wondering… that part about Step 1… the part where you decide with some specificity what it is you want… you didn’t by any chance stop at ‘breathing,’ did you?”

He cocks his head. “And male. Breathing and male.”

So… on Thursday, the day after Groundhog Day… if you by any chance heard a monumental sigh… that was me. I might be wrong on this point (I very often am), but I do suspect that sigh went ’round the globe twice.

Yeah.

Note to the masses: “breathing” just isn’t a sufficient resume for a boyfriend. Certainly it helps… not-breathing is very counterproductive. It’s just not enough, though. It’s just not.  It will lead to all manner of difficulties down the road. This “anyone will do” thing… that requires monumental effort to make it work.

Monuments… they tend to be large. Really large. Hence, “monumental.”

I’m not from here. I get that. I’m not especially “from” anywhere. That would be an experience I lack… something that sets me apart, ever so trivially, from others. Of course, while trivial, it also leads people to conclude that I’m sociopathic — something which I’m pretty sure is just not true.

It’s not so much the “not being from here” that irks people; it’s the “not being from anywhere.” Or perhaps it’s really my own puzzlement at the whole “being from somewhere” thing. I mean… for me… it’s just not normal, natural, or even especially desirable to “be from somewhere.” I don’t have a hometown and I don’t understand people who do have one… but whatever.

There is ice. Not so much ice. I’d be more comfortable describing the ice in terms of millimeters rather than in fractions of an inch. We’ll call it “two” … not that I’ve measured. Suffice it to say that it’s just not impressive ice. I’d not have expected any local response to the ice. I certainly had no response… other than to photograph it.

When you photograph the ice here about it has the tendency to look the same as every other time you’ve photographed it. I did that, you know. It’s true: root around in the archives and you’ll find a sparkly orange be-dazzlement of light flashing off of ice. Yup. On the very same tree. That ice was substantially thicker than this. This ice… it’s more of a glaze than a coating.

It’s gone now, by the way. I took that photo many hours ago, back when it was still dark. Not that it’s not dark now, because it is. The photo just wasn’t taken during this particular fit of darkness and couldn’t be taken now… not and have any ice in the trees.

You’d think, however, that this transient glazing of ice was mentioned explicitly in some sacred text as a harbinger of the end of the word.

Oh yeah… folks went a trifle nuts.

They’re bread and milk freaks here. I just don’t get that. I toddled off to the local marketeria to get some coffee on account of I was unacceptably low on coffee and (being quite addicted to coffee) this just cannot stand. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the ice. The ice was entirely coincidental (and substantially not in evidence as I traipsed off to the marketeria).

Note that “marketeria” just isn’t a real word. It’s one of my more annoying affectations. You’ll live through it, I trust.

There wasn’t any bread at the marketeria. Lots of empty bread shelves, but no bread. Ditto with the milk cooler: it had been divested of anything resembling contamination by milk or milk products.

Yes, Sweeties: the local freaks bought up the cream as well as the milk.

I have jokingly speculated that there is some sort of secret ritual involving the consumption of mass quantities of french toast. Otherwise, what the fuck are they doing with all that bread and milk? Surely they have bread and milk locked away in their kitchens left over from the recent snow. I mean… it’s totally not like they didn’t descend on all places bready like locusts because they did.

I just don’t get it. I’ve lived here for over twenty years and I just can’t get used to the phenomenon of the vanishing bread and milk. Nor can I get over the locals’ very peculiar relationship to all things frozen.

They carry on here. They do. They carry on as if they were residents of Fiji and all this freakish ice came out of nowhere to… well… end life as they know it.  They carry on as if this sort of thing didn’t happen last year, or the year before, or the year before that.

This sort of thing has, after all, been going on for the full three centuries of this quaint little burg’s existence. It has. I’m not kidding there.

And it’s not like this region has recently experienced some massive influx of immigrants from someplace tropical. Oh no. These people grew up with annual deposits of frozen matter just as their parents and grandparents did.

I asked, I did, of one of the older residents about the milk. I was wondering if the psychotic bread and milk thing happened back before there were cars. Did Grandpa have to hitch up the horse to the old buggy to hoard bread and milk at the first hint of impending snow?

Grandpa did not, as it happens, hitch up the horse. Grandpa walked to get the bread and milk.

Huh.

Anyway… Wee Orchid is unimpressed by the ice. Of course, it’s far more likely that Wee Orchid is unaware of the ice.

The Selaginella is doing nicely, as well. I’m quite surprised by that. My own response to such weather is to closet myself away with orchids and Selaginellas (and towering bananas) and ignore the whole thing. Certainly I have to minimize my interaction with the bread and milk locusts. They can’t drive their automobiles in snow or ice either.

That’s not quite the view from the Tree House. It’s not… not quite. The Tree House is a bit higher than that. OK… it’s more than a bit higher. I should not at all like to climb the distance between what you see here and what I see out my window.

Or would see out my window if looking out the window was more practical.

I would not have thought the wee orchid would be blooming this time of year. I’d have thought it would be… oh, I don’t know… somewhat later in the year. Still, there you have it.

The other window in the Tree House isn’t all that much more of a tenable situation. It’s just not.

Of course, having to peer around a banana really is my idea of looking at snow.

Not that that kept me from scurrying outside to take that first picture.

How do you interview someone on homosexuality?

By asking them questions.

Which questions would depend on just what it is you want to know. That’s how it works, you see: you want to know the answer to a question so you ask it.

Now, there really is a trick to this. There is. See… Gay folks have been asked the same freaking stupid questions over and over and over for decades now. Those questions tend to be annoying in the extreme… partly because of the repetition but mostly because of the shear stupidity of many of these questions. Some of them are shockingly offensive. Whatever. I did, however, say there was a trick to it. There is one: don’t bother.

So far as I can see, the only rational reason why people would ask the same stupid questions over and over and over again for decades is they aren’t listening to the answers. If you don’t plan on listening to the answer to a question, there’s little point in asking it. So don’t. That would be how you interview someone on homosexuality… leave them in peace and quiet.

Now, were you to plan on actually listening to the answers, then just go ahead and ask the questions.

How can you be gay and republican?

It’s fairly easy. There’s this peculiar myth flouncing about that the Democrats are some sort of Gift To The Gay People. It’s just not true. I know more viciously homophobic Democrats than I do Republicans. That may well be due to some insane sampling error so don’t take that to heart. Still, I know more Republicans than I know Democrats (Republicans are quite common hereabout) and yet I know more viciously homophobic Democrats than I do Republicans.

The problem here seems to be something I call “Europe-envy.” It seems to me that Democrats wish the US were something resembling a European state. Thing of it is, the US was founded in explicit contradiction to the concept of the European state as it existed at the time and remains so to this day. The US is not a state; it is 50 of them. “State” does not mean “province.” The Democrats seem to me to be of the view that the two words are synonyms… which does not at all reflect well on them because the two words aren’t at all synonymous. Some people care a very great deal about the distinction there. Don’t worry about it too dreadfully much: wars have been fought over far more trivial issues.

Why are there so many gays in (Place X)?

Chances are, there aren’t so many Gays… chances are you’re just a nasty homophobe and any Gays at all counts as “so many.”

In the redacted place in question, the number of Gays is one tenth of a percent above the national average. I mean… really… that’s not so awful many. This one-tenth of a percent bump almost certainly represents a very casual migration from the rural hinterland of said place. The countryside does not lend itself to gaiety. Many quite urban areas also fail to lend themselves to gaiety and so these areas also suffer from emigration to other places.

The Williams Institute crunched all those numbers some years ago.

I suppose things may have changed since then, though I doubt it. Generally speaking, an absence of Gays correlates to overall unpleasantness. If Place X really does have more than 4.1% Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals, then it’s probably a pleasant place to live. That’s been studied (though I feel no interest in looking up the citation). When I say “pleasant place to live” I do not mean “lends itself to gaiety.” I don’t. I mean it’s a pleasant place… for just everyone. Now, such places do lend themselves to gaiety. They do. You’ve heard that peculiar rumor, right? The one that alleges that Gays have demanding standards and exquisite taste? Sure. Whatever.

Now, the creepy question one should be asking is “Why aren’t there any Gays in (Place X)? Oh yeah. Places without Gays are quite dreadful hell-holes. That would be why the presumptively natural incidence of 4.1% has eroded: what with all those demanding standards and exquisite taste, Gay folks tend to pack their bags and head for somewhat more glittery, rainbow-enhanced places. Yup… no Gays is like not being able to hear birds. Have you ever been somewhere where there were no birds?

Creepy.

Wherein I Hand Out Advice

Yeah. First up is the teenager.

“How do I keep my teenager (a boy) from going through socks so quickly? He’s awfully hard on socks.”

Ouch.

Mind you, this is known: teen-aged boys have what might be termed “stink-foot.” It’s true so don’t bother denying it.

“Oh… not my teenager.” I hear that shit quite often. I do. Sure. And then I generally get around to fielding some variant on the stockings issue. Though… it’s not usually so grisly.

Keep them from going through socks?

Seriously?

Deep breath. (It’s just Feral going not-so-quietly-crazy over here.)

I went to the grocery store the other day. I do that. That’s because that’s where we keep the food and… I’m prone to eating from time to time. Silly habit, I know, but it keeps me alive. Whatever. They sell socks there. While that might seem odd (I mean… food… socks… they don’t seem all that natural a conjunction) I’d expect to be able to buy socks at a grocery store. Funny thing… I can. Imagine.

They cost $5.96. I suppose in the Philippines that’s a large sum. I’m told it’s almost a day’s wages. That’s another issue altogether. The teenager with his stink-foot who goes through socks lives here. The $5.96… that gets you six pairs, not just one. Nope.

At that price, you can pretty much call the socks disposable. Let the kid wear a pair, then throw that nasty thing away the next day. Use tongs… I’d not advise touching them because I have no idea why the used socks of stink-foot teenagers can be leaned against a wall. I’ve seen it: that is totally not one of my flights of hyperbole. Nope. Teenagers do evil things to socks… things that belong in a science-fiction horror movie like “Aliens.”

Cue the inevitable quotations:

“Looks like some kind of secreted resin.”

“Nobody touch nothin’!”

Yeah.

I mean… there is no need whatsoever to worry about something that costs one dollar. Really. Teenagers are expensive but their socks aren’t part of that equation. Use tongs if you must, but launder the socks with some regularity. From time to time, remind yourself that you really can afford to just buy brand new ones each day… they’re at the grocery store.

If you’re fussing over something so trivial, you shouldn’t have kids. Fixations on such trivialities lead me to believe just vile and uncharitable thoughts. Perhaps you see your child as some sort of intolerable burden.

Yeah. Knock that shit right the fuck of and buy some freaking socks.

Be advised that I’m pretty sure that grocery stores are not the most economical source of socks. Nope. I suspect the socks at grocery stores may just be a tad over-priced. I suspect you can get far more than six pairs of socks for $5.96 if you shop around.

“I need a boyfriend.”

Really? That’s not good. I mean… it strikes me as a symptom of something. See a doctor, preferably a psychiatrist. They may have a pill for that.

I’m more than half serious here. Boyfriends are the cause of all manner of drama and some small amount of tribulation. Boyfriends are not at all the solution to any problem I can conjure a mental image of. Really.

Now, that may be due to a lack of imagination on my part. I doubt that, but it’s remotely possible. So let’s just discard that bit of advice (no one takes it anyway) and move forward.

“Where have you been looking?” ask I.

“Looking?” parrots my woeful interlocutor. “What do you mean, looking?”

I think we’ve found the problem.

Boyfriends do not spontaneously materialize. They just don’t. My friend has not been looking at all… not anywhere. Yet, he thinks he “needs” a boyfriend.

So I rattle through Feral’s not-at-all-patented four-step process:

• Determine with some specificity what you want.
• Determine with some specificity where what you want is likely to be found.
• Go there.
• Be the boyfriend you expect to be.

All four steps are equally important, though I find people do the most slouching with Step 1 and Step 3. I’ve yet to meet anyone who even tried to do a fair effort at Step 4, but that’s a bit of a double-bind. I mean… if you are inherently a dishonest and manipulative cretin, who am I to argue about all the false behaviors people immediately trot out when they’re boyfriend hunting? Yeah… whatever.

Nope… you really do have to go looking for one. You really do have to look in a reasonable place. You just plain have to know what it is you’re looking for in the first place.

As for that last bit… if you can’t just be yourself then I don’t know what help there is for you.

Of course, the bit of psychiatry I recommend right of the bat still applies. I mean… “need” is a foul word. You need?

Just ouch.

That’s a favorite around the tree house… it is. Especially poor Basil. Of course, Susan has her fans, but being assaulted by bears… that’s just tops. All the nieces have this in book form. Indeed, all the wee critters of my acquaintance have it.

Huh.

Do I have to say that I am NOT responsible for this state of affairs?

Fine.

I’m totally not responsible for this state of affairs. It just happens that, entirely by coincidence (really), all of my sibs and minions share my taste in children’s literature.

Titus flying into bits is a huge hit amongst the wee ones. They have no taste. Basil… totes.

Anyway… ’round about now I’m supposed to be wishing everyone a happy new year. Imagine. I’ll not be doing so. (Surprised?) Here’s the thing (read this ever so carefully): Wishes don’t make things happen.

Got that?

I mean… you folks do realize that if my wishes were of any material significance whatsoever that a really very large, metallic asteroid would have struck the planet years ago. It would… had wishing been able to make it so. Then there’s all the really quite dismal plagues and other devastations.

Nope… I think I’ve pretty much demonstrated that wishing is somewhat less effective than a tinker’s damn… not that there are all that many tinkers about, or that they’ve been damning anyone lately… whatever.

But… I did say.

Some people, I am told, do not care for swords. Huh. There are, they say, people with no fondness whatsoever for sharpened bits of cutlery of any sort. “The hell,” you say. Yup. I’ve been told this is so. Incomprehensible, I know (to be sure), but these creatures not only exist, I’m told they’re quite common.

Well.

Should you be one of these creatures, do run off and play with whatever it is that could possibly be more entertaining than a sword. Don’t trouble yourself further.

So then… the swords. This escapade was not without some trifling bit of drama. No. As dramatics go, it wasn’t all that. Still, it seems untoward to say the escapade merely induced a little anxiety because… no, Sweeties… it was full-fledged drama, just not fledged with outlandish plumage. Nope: it was drab, sparrow-like drama, but drama nonetheless.

I am an old-fashioned sort. I like the Internet just fine… I do. I just don’t let it play with my money. I prefer my money to be played with by what are now considered antiquated institutions. The Internet is, I find, a most excellent shopping aid. Oh yes. Most excellent. It advertises, but in reverse. I quite dislike (yea… even hate and loathe) advertisements of the usual sort: some beastly and synthetic imitation of a somebody extolling the virtues of this, that, or some other thing that I couldn’t possibly want (not even a little bit). The reverse sort, where I root around and find merchants perfectly willing to indulge one of my flights of fancy in exchange for currency, that I like. I mean… it’s not like I don’t want stuff. I do want stuff. I’m what some people call a tad psychotic about wanting stuff on occasion. Finding it, then getting it is what I call a good day.

But we’re going to be communicating by mail, this merchant and I. Yah. “Snail mail,” I think they call it these days. Rumor has it that communications via Internet are covered under wire fraud laws. Huh. I don’t know anything about that. The mail fraud laws, on the other hand… those are old, and there are institutions set up to prosecute those who use the US postal system for fraud. Seriously… show me a merchant who will not use the US Postal service and I’ll show you a merchant that I immediately suspect of engaging in fraud. I really, especially dislike being defrauded.

We’re also going to be using the banking institution of my choice, more often than not, this merchant and I. It works like this: I write out a cheque, the merchant deposits the cheque, our respective bankers fuss over the details. Then I get my stuff. I surely would not expect to get my stuff before the merchant gets his money. It’d be nice if the exchange could be simultaneous, but I haven’t come upon a way to do that yet. Don’t take cheques? Some merchants don’t take cheques. That troubles me… it does. It reflects a fundamental distrust in the very foundation of modern commerce. Not that I’d not understand because I would understand. Oh yes… I know lots of folks who have a well-founded distrust of all kinds of underpinnings of civilization as we know it. I can do money orders. First choice would be Postal money orders and second choice would be Western Union. Why not? That particular institution might even be considered medieval. What’s not to like? But I just don’t do business with merchants who only take credit cards.

I mean… seriously… Henry VIII might be borrowing money from bankers to buy swords (I think he may have done more than occasionally) but that’s just not a reason to borrow money in my book. Not going to do it. Period. Money is illusory enough, and bank cheques are pushing the illusion a bit far but not so far that I can’t grasp it. Credit cards: those are as evil as coupons and for the same reason: it’s unregulated counterfeit money. It’s bad for the economy. I stick with “real” money… not that money is “real” at all. Whatever.

In addition to sharply limiting my shopping options (though avoiding people I believe to be fraudsters and scam artists at best is hardly an unwelcome limitation), my admittedly quirky approach to shopping is also uncomfortably slow. I get that.

It took a hair under a week for my mailed missive to reach my merchant. I expected that: the USPS was mediocre prior to 2001 and quite promptly after 11 September became nearly intolerable in that way that some drunken, dotty old uncle is nearly intolerable at family gatherings: this is to say completely intolerable, but technically minimally tolerable because you’ve gone and tolerated the intolerable because you’re fond of the old coot. Whatever.

It took my merchant a full week to decide I had, in fact, sent him the equivalent of US currency and not some piece of paper that resembled such a thing. Fine: it took my own bank one day longer to notice the same thing.

So that’s two weeks. I can live with that. Normally, UPS takes 3 or 4 days (with the grave caveat that Saturday and Sunday are not, by any stretch of the imagination, to be considered “days”). Yeah. Normally.

They didn’t. No. They took eight. Now… that’s way beyond my endurance. Four days is fine, but eight is not fine. No.

I had, in fact, spent a most surly day at the bake-shop mentally composing the really very stern (edited down repeatedly through the stages of threatening, obscene, hostile, and harsh) missive I was going to send my chosen merchant regarding this escapade.

However… upon my arrival home to scurry off to do just that, I could not help but lay eyes on my much expected package propped up where I could not possibly miss it. The spousal-unit did that. He’s sweet that way. It was still freezing cold from sitting for… oh… eight freaking days… in one or another conveyance of UPS.

I mean… eight days is reasonable if the package comes from California and has to cross an entire continent and two mountain ranges… not to mention a more than slightly impressive river that, last I heard, was missing one or possibly more slightly vital bridges. (We’re ignoring the fact that UPS owns airplanes because… oh yes, Sweeties… airplanes can circle the freaking planet in eight days so surely it was trucked.)

I had ordered something from South Carolina, after all… not California. I’m still more than half boycotting California. South Carolina… that’s totally just three days… maybe only two. Seriously.

Then I look at the package: It came, in fact, from California. Whatever. Eight days is not satisfactory but it will do, since my package did travel much, much further than I had anticipated. After all… I have my package. Not, mind you, that I did not promptly scour the Internet for evidence that this unexpected third party had, to even a trivial degree, supported California’s Proposition 8. I’d have sent the package back, in that case, swords or no swords. The verdict came back “not guilty” so all is well and I have swords and am well pleased.

That would be this sword on the top and this other one on the bottom. For their price, they aren’t bad at all. Nope.

The wakizashi, at least, does differ from the manufacturer’s description in one respect: it most assuredly does not have two pegs, one bamboo and the other brass. It has but one peg, a brass one. That’s fine. I think the two-peg thing is silly.

The hamon (which is what I was properly buying) is right nice. This is the shorter sword. The katana has a nicer hamon, but… the Kaze Katana has been reviewed more than occasionally on the Internet… and excessively harshly. There just aren’t that many pictures of the Kaze wakizashi out there, though.

I’ll grant, the ito does bear a striking resemblance to shoelace. It may even be shoelace. The problem isn’t so much that it’s not silk… it’s the weave. I can live with that, though. I can. I’m even going to get to handle these swords with what might just pass for wild abandon without fussing over whether I’m going to get the ito dirty or not. Besides… I get to spend many months, maybe even years, plotting on just what I’m going to re-wrap them with. The options for shopping are… just dazzling.

While others have found less than pleasant scuffs and scratches on their new blades, I have not. The polish… well, let’s just say that a proper polish on a katana costs $800 (it does) and I totally did not spend that much on the pair of them. I’d not have expected more. I am, however, quite likely to improve matters. The hamon will be much better for it.

The only real issues are the tsuba on the katana is loose and both the tsuba and the fuchi are loose on the wakizashi. That can be dealt with, however.

But there’s this word: yokote. In theory, that would be a transverse line on the blade just short of the tip, the angle where the plane of the tip meets the plane of the blade. I say “in theory” because these blades have no such angle. Nope. That’s just scratchiness on the tip… scratchiness that just cries out for polishing out. That being done, there won’t be a line there at all. That would be because these blades don’t have yokote, they’ve just been made up to look like they do. And we’re not talking drag queen make up here. No. Maybe Halloween costume make up. Sure. Folks have called this a “fake” yokote and that’s just way too charitable by far. This isn’t fake… it’s an imitation of fake. Fakery suggests a counterfeit, a more than passable attempt to approximate the real thing. This is… those steel-brushed stenciled hamon-like designs they used to (and, regrettably, still do) put on nasty-ass stainless steel thingies.

I can understand not having a yokote. A sword is allowed to not have one. Soon enough, these swords will look like they don’t have one rather than looking….

They just look scratched up this way. This is misplaced effort. They should stop doing that.

Not, mind you, that I don’t like my swords. Oh no. I’ve been far too busy cooing over them for that. I mean… I got them on Wednesday afternoon and here it is Sunday morning.

There remains, however, this issue of drop-shipping. I do not approve. When a merchant says “I have this thing,” I quite expect that to be literally true. This is not at all the same thing as saying “I expect to be able to procure this thing.” No. I don’t need mysterious third parties in my meager business relationships. I can just go to the third party and give him my money directly. If I’m going to pay a middleman (and I surely do not begrudge middlemen their pay), I quite expect that he will have actually done something. Phoning my snail mail order in to California does not count as “something” in my book. No. I mean… $50 for a phone call? Seriously? I’ll not be paying that again.

So then… as a reward for your patience, have a picture of a fat kitty.

Look… no swords of any sort. Just an 11 kilogram kitty.

And here I pretty much habitually answer questions. Isn’t that convenient? Whatever.

Bam

1. When did you turn gay?

I did not ‘turn’ Gay.

2. Were you born gay?

Why, yes. Yes I was.

3. Should gay people be accepted?

The short answer is ‘yes.’ The real question is ‘can gay people be accepted?’ You can’t have an answer from me on that one. You need to go ask some straight folks about that. For what it’s worth, in the aggregate, I just don’t see too much evidence that the answer to the real question is ‘yes.’ There are some bits of primatological evidence worthy of inspiring a bit of hope. There are. But Sweetie… if you need to delve into primatology for what ought to be a sociological question, you have a very, very big problem.

4. Were you abused as a child?

It depends on how you define ‘abuse.’ Really. Sexually abused? No. Physically abused? I happen to share that distinction with approximately 33% of my male peers and 26% of all my peers. Physical abuse is disgustingly common. Dead serious: look at a male, any male, in the US: one in three chance he was physically abused as a minor. Not. Kidding. Emotionally abused? Well, yeah. I don’t want to even think about the statistics on that one. I witness serious emotional abuse of minors every single day, and that’s just in walking around.

5. Why are parents always the last people to know their kid is gay?

Are they? I don’t find that they are. I find that “I always knew” is the more common response. Now, if you’re fishing around for why they seem to be the last a Gay kid comes out to… kids seem to save the things they care about most for last. They also seem to save the things that frighten them the most for last. But no… if a parent or two are the last people to know their kid is Gay, they’re probably more than a little on the stupid side, more than a little self-indulgent and prone to substituting their own fantasy life for reality, and more than a little bit assholes. But that’s just my opinion (rooted firmly in experience). It’s nothing to take seriously.

6. Do you think you’ll ever regret being gay?

Regret it? Oh… never. Never ever. Seriously. If I had a choice in the matter, I’d choose Gay. I don’t, so I’ll settle for never regretting it.

7. Were you ever attracted to the opposite sex?

Nope. Does that surprise you? I’m Gay. I’m male. That means I’m attracted to males generally. Now… think about that just for one minute, Sweetie. Males. Show me a female who looks like a male and I might think her cute. This has happened twice. I’m what I consider to be old, so that’s not at all saying something for the cuteness of baby-dykes with cute haircuts. I find that members of the opposite sex have unsightly bulges in places there ought not be bulges (and when I say unsightly I mean shaved-dog’s-ass ugly). I also find they’re distressingly squishy. Squishy is not attractive. Nope. My immunity to the imagined charms of females ought not trouble anyone. I’m told (and I’m convinced it’s true) that many not-Gay people find the opposite sex to be just enchanting.

8. Maybe you haven’t found the “right person” of the opposite sex yet?

No… I’m quite convinced this imaginary “right person” just doesn’t exist. Besides… I found the right person of the same sex. The spousal-unit would be seriously put out by this entire line of questioning. Theoretically, however… were you to find some woman that had broad shoulders, pecs of doom, a washboard stomach, a monstrous penis, and thighs bigger than I am… a stature of 6’2” would be handy… I’d give that a whirl. Thing is… I’m pretty fucking sure I just described something more than a little on the male side (and something in the heavyweight class of college wrestling, to boot). I don’t think there really are all that many women with monstrous penises and pecs of doom. Call it a theory.

9. How do you know you’re gay if you haven’t had sex with anyone? (have you?!)

Here’s the thing: having sex is not at all the same thing as wanting sex. It’s just not. Knowing whether or not you are Gay is a simple matter of introspection. I suppose it’s possible you aren’t capable of introspection. There may be disorders that preclude introspection. Or not. I know plenty of really miserably virginal Gays. They’ve not had sex with anyone at all. They’re not at all happy with that state of affairs. They want to… does ‘hide the salami’ ring a bell? Yeah. Whatever. They want. It’s not a question of doing. It’s a question of wanting.

10. What’s it like to be gay?

Like a handbag full of rainbows, Sweetie.

Should that answer seem too flippant for you, then I’m afraid you’ll have to answer the question “What’s it like to be straight?” first.

some questions that have been littering my desk.

Were gay men incarcerated in Auchewitz?

Yes.

If the question is more along the lines of “only in Auschwitz?” then the answer is most assuredly no. There were many more camps in addition to Auschwitz; some of them are far more relevant to the query. Indeed, almost all of them are more relevant to the query. I suppose my hang-up here is over the word “incarcerated.” See… Auschwitz is more readily associated with the word “exterminated” than it is with the word “incarcerated.” Those two words really aren’t the same thing.

Is Jeff Stryker gay?

As I recall, he is not.

At least you didn’t ask if he was dead, though. I tire of being asked if Mr. Stryker has died. (I understand he still remains among the living.)

Some of the people employed in Gay pornography are Gay. That’s moderately surprising. Pretty much all of the people employed in Gay pornography have been so employed because of ability and willingness to do the work and (more than occasionally) because of certain assets they bring with them. It would be peculiar and immoral for it to be otherwise. Ability and willingness ought to be all that’s required in any occupation. Additional assets are a fine thing to bring to the workplace but insisting on them as an employer isn’t all that prudent. Some employers might get away with truthfully claiming to have a superlative staff but all of them just can’t. Some people are, in some way, quite special, but you can’t go expecting all people to be quite special because… well… then there wouldn’t be anything special about them. While it’s a line from an animated children’s film, it’s entirely and self-evidently true: if everyone is special then no one is.

In any event, being Gay isn’t really all that much of an asset in Gay porn, you see. It’s hardly necessary. Now… were a lad to be so remarkably and resolutely heterosexual that he was just plain unable to perform any reasonable function in that trade… well… that would be a disqualification for employment. I would have to say that heterosexuality is often, if not always, considered by many to be a positive asset, however. Unfortunately, the market is a bit saturated with straight boys doing Gay porn of various calibers, so it’s not that much of an asset. Still… being Gay in Gay porn is considered by more than a few people to be of negative value.

Really… even today… if someone is performing in Gay porn the odds really are that he’s straight, not Gay. This would be an example of the definition of the word “counter-intuitive.”

Second things second:

I’ve been ruminating.

There was this study. There was. It’s not all that… not that it’s nothing because it’s definitely not nothing. Thing of it is… it’s a small study. Small sample sizes just aren’t that good a thing. Of course, large sample sizes can be unwieldy as all get out.

Anyway… the study… you can read about it in the press release or you can rummage through JoeMyGod‘s blog post on it or you can read the paper.

Pffft! What was I thinking? Yeah… right… I’ll just tell you about it because you and I both know you’re just not going to do any such thing.

There are these 78 kids (39 girls and 39 boys)… they’ve been answering all manner of entertaining questions for years. Also, they all have Lesbian parents. Cool, huh? No worries… it gets a bit better.

None of the adolescents in the study reported having been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver. Got that? None, zero, not one. What of it? One adolescent did report having been verbally abused. One is not zero… in this case one is 2.6% or so.

Now there’s this thing: the U.S. Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency prevention’s National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence. It’s a bit old, but it found that the lifetime rate of physical abuse of adolescents by parents or caregivers was something on the order of 26.1%.

If the children of Lesbians resembled the children of the population at large (which includes all manner of straight folks) then you might reasonably expect that 20 of these 78 adolescents might, at some point, have ticked the little box next to “yes” when asked anonymously if they’d been physically abused. Why not? A great many kids really do answer yes to that question… some 26% of them. The statistics for boys on this score are worse than those for girls and… small sample sizes be damned… it really would be reasonable to expect that 13 of the boys in that study would report having been physically abused. They didn’t.

Strangely enough (I find it exceedingly bizarre) there’s something else they didn’t find any of in this study of the adolescent children of Lesbian parents: adolescent Lesbians. True, over 18% of the girls said they were bisexual, but not one baby dyke in the lot. Huh. The boys in the study flirted with the national averages for adult Gays… pretty much spot-on when you consider how many percentage points one individual response would shift everything.

Huh.

Third things third:

Hello. How are you? I am fine.

There.

Yeah. Whatever.

I was traipsing down the street the other day and this fellow hailed me.

Now… that’s strange. Crazy people (mostly schizophrenics) talk to me on the street. We have a lot of those. Lately they’ve been quite nice. I dislike being accosted but greetings or informative rants, provided they are reasonably brief, aren’t what I’d call disruptions. Besides… it’s not like crazy people ask to be crazy. Trust me on that one: I know. Whatever. Crazy people talk to me on the street from time to time but not-crazy people very rarely ever do.

This fellow who hailed me wasn’t crazy. At least no professional has ever claimed so and neither has anyone of a more amateur bent. He used to be a co-worker and now he works somewhere else and so do I. Anyway, there’s this stream of questions. Where have you been? How have you been? What are you doing now? How are you?

Yes, yes, yes.

So it struck me that I hadn’t really stopped by the Tree House in a while. I blame creaky bones. Tree climbing isn’t much my thing and I’m not getting younger by any means. My life is really quite boring and there’s nothing to relate. Boring is quite good, you see. I have a most piquant dislike for change and so I find boring to be positively blissful… in comparison to change.

So. Things have changed, surely.

Nigel is still shockingly stout. He seems well adjusted if a little sedate. I suppose weighing 11 freaking kilos will do that… make Kitty sedate. Still, he has a most awesome pounce and is prone to attacking certain of his cat-toys with vigor and a little malice. The abode seems overlarge for him: he travels through it only when he has a complaint (which he delivers with a decided lack of imperiousness). Otherwise, he prefers one room. Maybe it’s the stairs.

Or not.

He’s discovered that my room (a place he ordinarily shuns) is a most excellent retreat from the wee bairn. It is, too… most excellent.

Which brings me to the next point in this tour of highlights: there is a… what’s the word? Ah yes… female. There’s a female living in the house these days. There isn’t really all that much exciting about that. She has proven to be far more helpful than disruptive. This is to say both that she has been most assuredly helpful. Oh yes. Also there is an unquestionable degree of disruption. After all… she has a wee bairn who visits regularly. Five-year-olds are… what’s the word? Ah yes… that would be “disruptive.” The one outweighs the other in a manner and to a degree that produces something that passes for contentment.

Fourth thing:

I have yet another new job. Yes, yes, yes… I was all a-twitter about being promoted not too dreadfully long ago. Funny thing: promotion does not mean anything in a company that goes bankrupt. Very conveniently, I was able to do something about that in a timely manner. That’s always pleasant.

The words for what I do used to be “baker’s boy.” I don’t know if that’s what they call it these days. I suspect not. Still… I’m not in the least bit what is meant by “a baker.” I do work in a bakery. I do things to dough. I do not much play with ovens. Certainly I do nothing resembling baking. I bake nothing. I do things to dough before they are baked. I also do trivial things to bread after it’s baked. More often than I would like, I sell bread to people… or try to. I have remembered just what it is about the general public that I don’t like: they are unlikeable.

Not a people person. Nope.

I also have a belated and new-found respect for waitresses. Don’t get me wrong: waitresses are still the primary source of evil in restaurants, but I no longer work in one of those places. Nope. I am waitress-free. However, it now has become clear that waitresses (apart from being evil) also have been shielding me from the full brunt of the wickedness that is the general public.

I am not at all sure what possesses a shopper at a bakery to insist that one of the staff scurry off to some other business and make an order for them to pick up at some later time. I mean… really. That’s a personal assistant. If you want things like that done for you, you should hire a personal assistant. Totally serious. You should not ask me to do that. I won’t, you see. Now… were you to want some bread… funny thing, that… I work in a bakery; we sell bread. That I can do.

I also work a great deal more than I’m accustomed to… and at just an unseemly hour of the morning. Totally serious: I go to work earlier than I used to go to bed back when I toiled away in restaurant land. That’s not at all pleasant.

But then that’s why they pay me. I’ve said it many times and I’ll not stop repeating it: it is customary to pay for that which is pleasant and customary to get paid for that which is less than pleasant. Not that I dislike my job.

Goodness no.

Apart from the predawn nonsense (even in summer), the place is very nearly drama-free. As far as I can tell, the sorts of drama common in restaurants just physically cannot happen in a bakery.

Except for the customers.

I’d not have thought that the transactions at a bakery were all that difficult to grasp. Exchange currency for bread. That doesn’t seem all that hard, but then that must just be me because… oh my… far too many people have just astonishing difficulty.

At a bakery? Really?

Yup.

Freaks.

But… yeah. I make a hefty chunk more money doing things to dough than I had previously. That’s a whole lot better than being poked in the eye with a stick.  And spending it… let us not forget the wonders of spending money. He who said that money can’t buy happiness totally did not know how to shop.

Thing five:

Notwithstanding freakishness, I “pulled the trigger” on a sword today. That’s of more than passing note. This “pulled the trigger” stuff… it’s a household term that infests our vernacular. There are things that one thinks about, there are things that one considers, there are things that one seriously considers, and then there are things that one “pulls the trigger” on. Buying swords is one of them, surely. After all, how many swords could one possibly need? “Need” set aside, its just not something that one purchases all that often. There’s a difference between shopping for a sword and buying one. I bought one… hence, “pulled the trigger.”

I’m going to totally ignore the fact (and it surely is one) that there are millions of people who just have no interest in having a sword. Whatever.

The sword itself isn’t even the interesting point (though… it’s a sweet-ass sword and I’m looking forward to its imminent arrival). Nope. It’s that I decided to buy one. It means the phenomenon known as “The Disruption” has passed.

Yup. My life got disrupted in a most unsavory manner and to a decidedly lamentable extent about ten years ago and now that reversal of fortunes has gone and reversed itself… thanks to the bakery (freaks aside). This is a good thing… though not that good. It’s of interest to me, though. I definitely notice a change in my standard of living that allows for sword purchases. It’s not something I often get to do.

I bought a sword back then, too… sixteen years ago, that is. I smugly note that, in the intervening time, no one has died or bled on account of that sword nor has any property damage occurred. I still have it, so all the histrionic hand-wringing that certain people evinced about it being stolen and used to cause harm or to cause serious injury (or worse) to me was errant paranoid speculation unsupported by reality. I expect my new sword will have a similar career: it’s going to sit around looking sweet-ass and making me quite content. Whatever.

There are nifty calculators out there on the Internet that will tell you what a certain sum of money in 1994 is in today’s currency. Similarly, they’ll tell you what a certain price today would have been back then. I think that’s neat… particularly since I’m really quite uncomfortable with the task of doing so without the calculator. As it happens, the sword I’m in the process of acquiring costs less than the one I already possess once the prices are adjusted for inflation. That’s of note because I’m of the view that my new sword is just worlds better than the one I already have. Oh yes. Oddly, the chief reasons I still have the old sword is that it’s not at all worth giving away and I just can’t picture a prudent and appropriate way to dispose of it. You just don’t lob swords into a convenient trash can. At least in my reality you don’t.

I don’t at all like my current sword. To a great extent, that’s because a whole lot of irredeemable trash was marketed as something of value in the 90s. The equivalent of the sword I’m in the process of purchasing really was available back then… for a considerable price. The market for swords is vastly different today than it was sixteen years ago. Normally, I dislike change. This time, I’ll let that pass.

Thing the sixth:

The whole sword thing brings up another point: I find I really dislike people. Wait… no… the bakery brought up that point. Still, the sword thing brings it up too… independently. Yuck.

See… it’s not what you’d call an expensive sword. I have no need for an expensive sword, though there are expensive swords that are both worth their price and far above my interest in buying. Given the choice between a sweet-ass sword and a car, I’m afraid I’ll pick the car. Choosing between a sword and a refrigerator is somewhat different. I have a refrigerator, you see. That’s the price range under discussion. Back in 1994 you might have been able to find a sword that cost somewhere in the vicinity of the price of a meal for two in a casual bistro. You certainly can today. Yeah.

Did you know you get what you pay for? You more or less do. Cheap is… often not all that desirable. Cheap swords can be problematic in many ways and I just don’t want one. That’s what’s wrong with the sword I already have… today it would retail (fairly) for somewhere around $20. It would be worth that much, too. Had I paid that much back then… that would be good. You don’t always get what you pay for, you see, but if you don’t pay for it, you surely won’t get it. Swords require a certain amount of shopping.

I’m prone to seeking out opinions. I want opinions on retailers. I want opinions on manufacturers, I want opinions on specific products. I do. And I pursue them with some diligence. Some might call it fanaticism. Whatever. I even seek the spousal-unit’s view. I’m like that. There’s a price at which I won’t spend the money without his approval. This is a practice I think everyone ought to engage in habitually. What that price is really will vary with who you are. For me… it’s $500. That get’s me two swords, not one. Since I’m talking about a katana and wakizashi en suite, that’s sensible and it means mid-range: there are more expensive swords and there are cheaper swords. I can’t afford the one and I can’t abide the other.

I showed dear spousal-unit a picture of a pair I had (almost) settled on. They were mid-range as well, if less expensive. He says, “OK. Is it going to make you happy?”

Isn’t that sweet? He cares if I’m happy. I think it’s sweet. Whatever. Then I say, “then there’s this.” I switch to the other tab on the trusty web browser.

“Oh,” says the spousal-unit. “Oh my.”

“Does that mean you don’t like the other ones?” says I.

“The other ones look trashy.”

Yup. That’s what he said. It’s somewhat comforting to know that my personal inclination to add $100 or so to what I planned on spending met with the spousal-unit’s approval. I had already decided that I wanted the more expensive ones. The whole point of the exercise was to obtain swords that would, once and for all, be satisfactory, and that triggered the requirement for spousal approval. Besides… he has much better taste than I do. It’s unfortunate in a way that he cares so for my happiness. Really. I mean… he should have said, “No, dear… those look trashy” when he first saw them. Fortunately, I know him quite well and had alternatives already to hand.

For those in a similar position… rooting around on the trusty inter-web for mid-range sword opinions, the spousal-unit says that Masahiro swords look trashy in comparison to Cheness swords. This should not dissuade prospective purchasers of Masahiro swords. No. They look to be fine things and I was considering them. Cheness costs more. I needed the spousal-unit’s approval on that degree of price increase. I got it. The spousal-unit also rejected Ryumon and Hanwei on similar grounds. His view of the trashiness factor directly paralleled price: the more costly examples were less trashy to his eye than their inexpensive counterparts.

It was the curve. Should someone from Hanwei, Masahiro, or Ryumon be rummaging about looking for feedback, it was the curve. The spousal-unit finds that swords whose curvature approximates a simple arc from a circle look “trashy.” It’s not that good a thing when the spousal-unit calls something “trashy.” I, for instance, just won’t subject him to the sight of a pair of swords sitting in a rack day in and day out if he thinks they look trashy. Gracious, no. I would far prefer that he says something like, “Oh… oh my. That’s a sweet-ass sword.”

I sought other opinions as well. Fortunately, those are abundant on the Internet. I was able to read, for example, that the Hanwei Raptor series was a superior choice (and cheaper.) Yeah. See… the spousal-unit said “Absolutely not. That’s not coming into the house.” Not that I was planning to. No. I sought opinions, found I disagreed with them, and that’s that. Should someone else have a spouse who thinks the Hanwei Raptors have a pleasing appearance… that’s not a bad value. Go ahead and buy it. I’m just not going to pretend that anything Hanwei sells is equivalent in any way to anything that Cheness sells. They just aren’t: The spousal-unit doesn’t make nice sounds when exposed to Hanwei and he does when exposed to Cheness and that’s that.

Now… no one else is married to my particular spousal-unit (pretty much by definition). Much that is good and wholesome doesn’t meet with his approval. Since I am married to my particular spousal-unit, his approval means a good deal here in the Tree House.

I really do dislike people. (That’s the point that’s being elaborated upon, in case you’ve forgotten.) Some of the opinions out there about this or that manufacturer really aren’t grounded in reality and yet are presented as if they were. That’s… nuts. What you like is what you like and a great many things really are allowed to be disliked. That’s not what’s floating around out there, though. No.

First there’s the collector snobs. Yeah. See… antique katanas from Japan are certainly a something. They are bought and sold and collected. That’s fine. “Katana,” however, just isn’t a term of art for those thingamabobs. “Nihonto” is, but katana isn’t. Not in vernacular speech. Get over it. By no means should anybody ever seek or pay heed to the opinion of one of these critters (nihonto collectors or aficionados) on anything other than nihonto. These critters are most offensive in those circumstances and offensive in a manner and to a degree that does them no credit whatsoever. I think it might be better to never engage one of them socially on any topic, but I won’t go so far as to recommend doing so. No. Just consider that it might not be the best idea.

Then there’s the sword-jockeys. Ick.

Ummm… I’m going to go with the social embargo on those critters. Just ick. “Sword-jockeys” are folks who not only have swords but also cut things with them. This activity is not, itself, objectionable. No. I heartily endorse it for those with the prudence to wield sharp objects and the sense to do so without causing unintended damage or injury. It’s fun. I quite like it.

But…

Let’s say a question is put to the peanut gallery: What (or which) sword is best suited to a beginner who is loathe to damage a sword due to inexperience? The answer to that question is most assuredly not “get experience.” Certainly experience is a good thing. Certainly a sword can be damaged by inexperience (and with no small amount of risk). The questioner is quite aware of that and wanted to know what or which sword would best resist the sorts of heinous errors a beginner might inflict on it. The answer is a through-tempered spring steel model. It’s not that they’re infinitely forgiving, it’s that they’re more forgiving.  While it is true that any sword can be damaged by inexpert use, some are far more likely to be seriously damaged by it than others and this is exactly the point the hypothetical questioner was making a query about. Repeating the impetus for a question does not pass for answering it.

Also, learning how to properly use such a thing really is a most excellent idea. You could say it’s required (though I won’t).

The question isn’t about the value of experience… it’s about specific durability. Never, ever answer a question about one subject with an answer from another… no matter how important the other answer might seem to be.

Then there’s this positively delusional fixation sword-jockeys seem to have for their particular favored manufacturer. That’s nuts. You’re going to get snobby over the low to medium-priced manufacturers? Really? That’s an activity usually reserved to the high and very high-priced stuff. I’ll totally let you puff yourself over a fifteen hundred dollar sword and I’ll totally let some proud possessor of one of the three thousand dollar jobs out-puff you. I’ll even grant pride of place for puffery to the people with the twenty and thirty thousand dollar swords. After all, there really are swords that cost more than cars and there really are swords that surpass the customary market values (some people call them ‘priceless’ but that means something that’s not too different from ‘worthless.’)

But puffery over a $50 price difference? You don’t get to puff over $50 or $150. When a sword is under $500 you’re obviously not talking about nihonto and you aren’t even coming close to talking about what more than $1000 will buy. Snobbery on the low end of the market is just absurd.

I don’t like unwarranted snobs. They’re grotesquely abundant. This makes me much less than happy. I find I don’t like partisans of any stripe. It hardly matters if the example at hand is a snit-fest about whether Hanwei is in some way inherently superior to Cheness, though since both companies have good reputations and make  fine products (for what they are) there is no reason whatsoever to get into a snit over one or the other. Of late it seems I’m surrounded by people who absolutely insist on getting into high dudgeon over the most absurd trivialities.

What might be taken for a seventh thing but isn’t really:

Take fluoride in water. I have developed an allergy to people who have firm opinions on this topic. They seem to me to be… well… quite insane.

Some places fluoridate their water supply; most of North America would be an example. Some places do not do so, and most of Europe would be an example of that.

Seriously, people: any claim you might make on either side of a debate on fluoridation would, if in the least bit accurate, be clearly demonstrable. If fluoride is such a wondrous thing (the arguments for that position are just grotesquely specious) then the lack of it in Europe will conveniently produce ample statistics illustrating the point. It is a fact (seriously) that the statistics just don’t illustrate anything of the kind. If fluoride is such a heinous thing (and there are some seriously cracked pots making these claims) then surely some statistical illustration of the horrors wrought on the peoples of the Western Hemisphere could be brought to light. I’ll not be holding my breath while someone looks for it.

Truth be told, since water fluoridation does cost money and since the supposed benefits of fluoridated water are so difficult to demonstrate, it seems to me the world will not come to an end if some district declines to continue doing so. Since the impropriety of water fluoridation is likewise so difficult to demonstrate, I’d not expect very many miraculous cessation of complaints (apart from dental fluorosis in children) to arise from declining to spend the money on the chemicals.

I expect such nonsense in topics like religion (or the lack of it). Those people have been just bat-shit crazy for years and years. I’ve grown used to it in the now absurd positions taken by Democrats and Republicans. Rumor has it that the Green Party is more sane in Europe and the South Pacific than it is in North America but… I especially need to find me a talisman that wards of Greenies. Nope. Religion and politics firmly remain on the list of disallowed topics in polite conversation.

But menuki?

For the love of a good fuck! How can someone, in complete seriousness, object to a sword only on the basis of its less than pleasing menuki?

Fuck me with a Q-tip.

Children… listen for a change.

Katanas come apart. They’re supposed to come apart. It’s true you aren’t supposed to play with them like Tinker-toys in that regard; habitual dismantling of a katana is not good for the fit of the tsuka. They do come apart, however. You really are supposed to store them in shirasaya. If you don’t like the menuki, replace the fuckers. Ditto for the tsuba. You could, if you wish, redecorate your sword seasonally and pop a lovely autumnal ito on the thing when the maple leaves turn colors. That wrappy shit… it comes off and really ought to be replaced from time to time (though seasonally is a little… excessive).

Complaining about the fittings on a sword  is like complaining about the shoelaces in a pair of shoes. Complaining about the blade… that’s different. If you don’t like the blade then you don’t like the sword. The fittings… those are replaceable and have always been replaceable and really ought to be considered inherently replaceable because… they just are.

Yeah.

Deep breath.

The real seventh thing:

I was in a cafe the other day. I do that from time to time… mostly to get coffee while out and about. That would be where they sell coffee when you’re out and about: in cafes.

A ‘mo friend (a gentleman of an age that I assiduously refrain from drawing attention to, what with him being what we all consider more than a tad old) was sitting, as is his wont, with his much younger protege. By protege I mean just that. It’s totally not something else. He sees me and says (as he will), “Oh look, it’s Feral. Let’s ask him what he thinks. He has opinions about just everything.”

Yeah. Guilty as charged. Except… surely everyone has opinions about just everything. At least everyone alive. I’m open to the possibility that the dead have few, if any, strong opinions. Whatever.

“What fresh hell is this?” says I (because one can never quote Dorothy Parker too frequently… especially when they just walk right into it).

“Oh, Feral, you’re an attention whore and you know it.”

“Am not,” I insist. “I am a slave to strong coffee and a righteous, god-fearing blueberry muffin. There are very few things on Earth more important than a fine cup of coffee and an excellent muffin. I’ll thank you to leave me to them in peace and I will enjoy them in almost complete silence… like I always do.”

“We were talking about the ‘It Gets Better’ things,” says my friend. I’m standing there considering calling him an old hag and beginning to pine for my muffin.

“Oh…. let’s not and say we did. My muffin calls. How about let’s not and then say no more at all.”

“That’s the sort of thing you’d be into, don’t you think?” continues my friend.

“Ummm… no,” says I.

“Well, what do you think? Does it get better?” This from the waifish protege.

I sigh. There’s just no escaping the waifish protege. He’s waifish. I have very little immunity to waifs. “Be warned,” says I. “My opinions are known far and wide as lengthy, voluminous, and prone to exceed the average person’s attention span by a very good bit.”

“What do you think?” the wee one repeats. They are like pit bulls, these youngsters. They just aren’t all that easily guided onto pleasant topics like what may very well be a perfect blueberry muffin.

So I say, “In fairness, I offer you a choice between the short answer and the long version.”

“Both,” he says. The little bitch.

“Then no. The answer to your yes or no question is no. The longer version really does depend. What is meant by the words “it,” “gets,” and “better?”

“Huh?” says he. The wee ones are a lot like dogs. They cock their heads to one side when confused by anything more complicated than a blueberry muffin. I quite like dogs. The wee ones are unlike dogs in one very important respect: a dog will let you eat your muffin in peace in exchange for a small portion; the kids won’t.

“How old are you, Sweetie?” says I.

“Fifteen.”

“Oh dear. Did you know I have a houseplant older than you? I have two such plants really. It’s almost disturbing.”

My not at all young friend says, “You’ve kept two houseplants alive for more than fifteen years? That says a great deal about you. You must be a very caring person.”

Quick aside: to properly appreciate my older friend, you must understand that he’s basically a gravelly-voiced Harvey Fierstein. In fact, I suspect the actor may have appropriated the accent from my friend.

“Whatever,” says I. I turn to my younger acquaintance. I say ‘acquaintance’ because, properly speaking, he’s someone else’s problem and I only incidentally ever lay eyes on him. “Fifteen is troublesome. That’s high school. High school is not real. High school is artificial. It’s also quite a wretched place. In due course, you shall no longer be in high school, whether it’s because you graduate or stop going. Once you stop going to that place, all of the unpleasantness associated with that place pretty much comes to a dead stop. The world is not at all like high school. In that respect, it does get better.”

“Are you sure?” says he.

“Oh yes. I’m sure,” says I. “There’s more. Do you wish to hear it?” He does that bobble-head thing with his head. Puppies would nod in just that way, were puppies prone to nodding their heads. “Fine. Normally there’s little point to saying this, but you aren’t done growing yet. Most importantly, your brain isn’t done. It’s busily working on it, but it’s not done yet. You don’t have the full apparatus for thinking.”

“I don’t?” says the waif, who obviously thinks I’ve just said something unpleasant about him.

“Not yet, Sweetie. Your brain has a most impressive setup for processing emotions. One thing you do with consummate skill is feel. You also remember quite nicely. The two work well together; you have a great deal of feelings about everything you learn. What you aren’t so good at just now is putting the things you know together in ways that will let you understand them. Right now, you think in ways that make adults say ‘what the hell were you thinking?’ alot. In fact, they probably add, ‘You weren’t thinking.’ That would be because what grownups call thinking isn’t something teenagers do very much of. You feel about things. You’re very, very good at that. As you get older, you will get better and better at putting things together. You will think about things in addition to feeling about things. You’ll even do less feeling; you’ll be thinking instead. It’s called ‘growing up.’ You with me so far?”

The kid does that cute little frown thing… the one they do when they’re trying very hard to think with an inadequate apparatus for doing so. It’s quite shocking how resilient the brain is. It can actually do a half-decent job of thinking just by processing emotional responses. “You mean when I get older I won’t feel so bad about things?”

“That is exactly right,” says I. “Right now there are things that make you feel bad, or frightened, or sad, or angry. Everything, really. When you get older this will not be the case. In that sense, it really and truly does get better.”

“But you said it doesn’t get better,” the wee one says.

Clever boy. Mind like a sponge, that one. “It depends on what ‘it’ means. Your ability to deal with all manner of things will get better. If ‘it’ means the things you don’t deal with so well… those have been around for a while. I suspect they’ll remain. People got bullied when I was in high school. They got bullied in the very same way. No one did jack shit about it then. People get bullied today; nothing gets done about it today. It does not get better. It ought to… I think were people to try to make it better it would. They just won’t try. It does not get better. You’ll just grow up.”

“How old are you, anyway?” the youngster says.

“Old enough that, when I got my driver’s license, I was obliged to physically demonstrate the manual hand signals for signaling a turn. This was because not all cars had those blinking lights. New ones did, but the older cars didn’t. In a car with no turn signals the driver was required to give a manual signal to other drivers. It is my understanding that, while the hand signals remain the same today, you shall not be required to know them when you get your license.”

“Is that true?” the wee one says to my older ‘mo friend.

Being a gentleman (and more than moderately guilty of the charge of being a caring person) I step in and say, “No, Sweetie… Just no. It would be indelicate to suggest that Boopsie here has any knowledge of antique cars.”

“Thank you,” my friend says with much pomposity. “But I’m sure I couldn’t remember quite so far back into ancient history as you can, Dear.”

“It’s true, Sweetie,” I say to the youngster. “I graduated high school thirty-one years ago. I was your age thirty-four years ago.” The boy’s eyes widen at the spectacle of such immense numbers being used to describe time. “Some things have changed since then. High school seems to me to have gotten worse, not better. You will surely be better at dealing with difficulty next year than you are today. The year after that, you’ll be better at it still. Eventually, you’ll have grown right out of it. Also, the only places you’ll find anything resembling high school are prisons and the army. You should avoid both.”

“I told you this was just the sort of thing you’d be into,” my friend says.

“Absolutely not,” says I. “No. Just plain no. Telling kids to just stick it out and wait years for them to grow into being able to deal with intolerable situations is not the sort of thing I’m into. In fact, it touches on being evil.”

“Really,” the old friend says.

“Really. If your young friend here finds himself in a situation that needs getting better, then you had damn well better get your ass in gear and fucking make it better right now. If not, then I’ll give it a shot. He should not be waiting five or ten years. He may be on the young side but you… well you just aren’t. No one thinks you’re too young to know the solutions for his problems. You do know them. If not, then I may well. But don’t you dare tell him he has to just wait. You make it better.

“Yes Sir General Feral Sir,” says my friend.

“That line works better if you say it just a tad more butch,” says I. I turn to the youngster. “Should you find something that needs getting better, do tell someone. It’s very likely that something can be done about it. Really.”

Thing the last:

Whoa… long post. But I did say it was the omnibus post of doom. I did.

“How did you do that?” she exclaims.

“Do what?” say I.

“Make him listen to you,” she says.

“Umm… I’m pretty sure I did no such thing, but, on the off chance that I might actually be guilty, what the holy hell are you talking about?”

So she explains… at length. All becomes clear (explanations are like that, when they’re done properly). It’s the fourteen-year-old.

Now… little kids are little kids. Rug-rats, ankle-biters, vile little vermin: they’re perpetually-leaking sacks of unspeakable goo. Have you noticed? Kids leak goo from just about every orifice… possibly every single orifice. I can’t bring myself to count them up for possible exceptions on account of the unspeakable vileness of the goo we’re talking here. There may be species of kid goo I’m not yet acquainted with and I surely want to remain ignorant on this score. Oh yeah… one can never go wrong avoiding unspeakable goo. It’s not so much that I don’t like kids. I like them fine in very tiny doses. After that, they really must go far away. To my perpetual regret, kids seem to like me well. I don’t get that. Vile, sticky, gooey things. Ick.

Little kids metastasize. Not much liking kids, I’ve paid only enough attention to them to dodge flying gobbets of unspeakable goo and come up with ever more creative ways of avoiding them. However, at some point, they metastasize. By the time they’re twelve years old they’re thirteen different kinds of freaky. People think I’m kidding. Piff! They think I’m kidding about the unspeakable goo, too. No. Not kidding. Kids leak goo almost constantly. There is always some manner of effluent and about half the time it just plain stinks. Some kids are less stinky than others, but those tend to be the germ-ridden ones. Veritable fountains of plague.

Did you know that successfully avoiding children is a most excellent preventative for influenza? It is. Whatever.

Nope… not kidding… thirteen different kinds of freaky. It has been my observation that youngsters drop a flavor of freaky each year (if all goes well… often all does not go entirely well). This means that one might expect a thirteen-year-old to be twelve different kinds of freaky and a fourteen-year-old only eleven kinds of freaky.

The fourteen-year-old was the subject under discussion and he is (oh yes) a full eleven kinds of freaky. This makes him a freak. Pretty much a total freak. I mean… how many flavors of freaky does it take to make a freak? Just one, Sweeties. Just one. When I say he’s freaky (and really… no one disagrees with me on this specific point: he’s freaky) I mean he’s just not human. He’s some kind of alien. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. He’s a fine little alien. It’s just that, when compared to an adult human being he’s some eleven different kinds of freaky and that can (oh yes… it can) be trying.

There is a bright side to the fourteen-year-old. There is: he’s not twelve. See… thirteen different kinds of freaky is far worse than eleven kinds of freaky. This freakishness just isn’t something to complain about. Unspeakable goo is something to complain about and teenagers are comparatively free of goo… comparatively. Freakishness is something to consider when trying to communicate. I very strongly recommend that. The fourteen-year-old is not a reasonable human being. No. The fourteen-year-old is a freak eleven times over. This is not going to go away any time soon. The situation will improve, surely. Next year he’ll have dropped down to ten flavors of freaky. Ten may be better than eleven and it’s just a world better than twelve, but it’s still pretty fucking freaky. Never mind that we aren’t going there just yet: he’s not fifteen. Nope. It’s eleven fun flavors of freakishness for us. Yippee.

He’s not going to be anything resembling “normal” for a good while. You have to realize that. Do the math. Twenty-five. When he’s twenty-five years old it’s quite likely that he’ll not be at all freaky. He may not be pleasant or cuddly, but he’ll be a plain old ordinary human being and not some alien freak. That’s not today. Today he’s an alien freak with eleven Technicolor varieties of freakishness in a kaleidoscopic array that boggles the mind. Get over it. I really do prefer to limit myself to eight or nine kinds of freaky. That’s a lot to take on. If I had my druthers, I’d stick to three kinds. Twenty-two-year-olds are just the ornament of the world: I quite like them, and I find their three highly-polished kinds of freaky quite charming (though goo tends to make a strong reappearance around then and some of it is quite unspeakable… almost worthy of a four-year-old.)

The fourteen-year-old is not twenty-two. On the bright side, this means I have never once seen him vomit. This is not something I can say of any other twenty-two-year old of my acquaintance. Piff! I know one twenty-two-year-old who did serious (and quite scientific) experiments on adjusting his diet and alcohol intake to produce the most spectacular vomit. His findings were… unspeakable. Oh no… never ever imagine that I mean something else when I use the word “freaky.” Three kinds of freaky aren’t eleven kinds of freaky but they really, truly are freaky. Oh yeah. The fourteen-year-old does not vomit, nor does he deliberately augment his natural vileness in any way. This is a good thing… something to cherish while it lasts.

So I say, “I didn’t get him to listen to me. He’s eleven different kinds of freaky and there’d be no point.” You do remember that the subject of this diatribe is how I (allegedly) got the fourteen-year-old to listen to me? Yeah.

I just don’t know how it is in other countries. I don’t. I doubt it’s much different. I can’t say whether speaking a language other than English would make a difference. I doubt that, too. The freaky freakishness of teenagers seems to me to be universal. Whatever.

Through a peculiarity of birthday, the fourteen-year-old is in Grade 8. He’s not in high school. English is his first language. People imagine that he speaks English. I can see how they make that error because he does… after a fashion. Most people adjudge eight-year-olds competently fluent.

The fourteen-year-old has to take English class. This should (really… it should) be the first clue. Do you know why you have to take English classes? That’s right: to learn English. Do you know who has to take English classes? Aha! Think it might be folks who don’t fucking speak English? Yeah. Therein lies the problem here. The fourteen-year-old does not, in fact, speak English. Sure… most people adjudge him fluent in it and jabber away at him incessantly but most people are just as dumb as a sack of hammers. The fourteen-year-old most assuredly does not speak English.

I’ve seen his English homework. I have. It contains lists of vocabulary words. They aren’t particularly splendid words, either. They’re really very basic words. He does well enough with them because he’s a bright fellow but… most sincerely seriously, Sweeties, he has some serious gaps in his vocabulary… gaps that are being addressed in the customary fashion and at the customary pace. Trust me: they totally aren’t going to be letting him get out of taking English for just years and years. The reason teenagers have to take English is because they don’t fucking speak the language yet. They’re in process. “Learning” is not at all the same as “learned.” It’s just not.

So… people jabber away at the fourteen-year-old and wonder why he doesn’t appear to listen to them. There’s a really, very good chance he hears just fine. Thing is, he’s still going through his vocabulary lists.

“Oh. Why didn’t they just say so?”

That’s what I usually get. Some not-so-very-old person asks the really-far-older-than-is-comfortable person a question, I answer it, and that’s what I get. Seems grumpy old grown-ups really have very little better to do than to jibber inane syllable strings and then have the temerity to be perturbed when their pronouncements fall on deaf ears. This happens a lot with the fourteen-year-old.

“What’s ‘acting out’?” says he.

“It’s jibber-jabber,” says I. “Doesn’t mean jack squat. It’s just noise. Does someone think you’re acting out?”

“Yeah.”

It’s just shocking how much sullenness a fourteen-year-old can pack into a single syllable. It’s not shocking that the fourteen-year-old is sullen. Oh no… that’s one of his really quite banal flavors of freakishness and it passes for normal in teenagers (not that the dear little freaks are anything resembling normal). No… it’s shocking how expressive one syllable can be. So we go over the whole drama. As usual, the psychiatric term had been misused. So I say, “They meant to say ‘misbehaving.’ I could tell you what ‘acting out’ means, but they were using the phrase wrong and there’s no point in bothering.”

He purses his lips, scrunches up his forehead, and then about four seconds later says, “Why didn’t they just say so?”

“They thought they had,” says I. “But they need more work on their vocabulary lists.” The misbehaving isn’t such a big deal. Once translated into proper English and words the boy knows… there were no protests of innocence, no denials. “Misbehavior” was far milder a word than the fourteen-year-old would have used. He had deliberately done that which he did and his intent was something more along the lines of a criminal act. Being fourteen and all, his execution was sufficiently faulty that he was not successful. That, and his plan of action really couldn’t have been rationally associated with the desired outcome. Fourteen-year-olds are like that… freaky.

So we talk about how his little misadventure didn’t work. We did not talk about how it wouldn’t have worked in the first place because that would be… dumb. It didn’t work and that’s all that’s needed. Why do something that doesn’t work? That’s dumb. It’s useless. Especially when this misadventure has been tried over and over again and just never has worked… not ever. Not even once. That’s totally useless. Try something else.

“Yeah. OK.”

The fourteen-year-old knows the word ‘useless.’ He uses it very often… daily, even. He uses the word ‘dumb’ as a synonym. He even comprehends this peculiar notion that doing something that demonstrably does not produce the desired result repeatedly is just dumb. So he stopped. Now… this is a good thing, a thing that all manner of adults have been trying to persuade the lad to do (or stop doing, as the case happens to be).

And that’s how I got charged with “make him to listen to you.”

I didn’t, you know. “Make” him. He just did. He listens to just everything. Lots of it is just gibberish to him, though. And can I just say how very (very) annoying it is to have to sort out the incompetent babbling of middle-aged, college-educated professionals? The fourteen-year-old has a rapidly growing but rudimentary vocabulary. He just does not do well with oddly-used figures of speech and he has no hope of sorting out erroneously-used jargon.

This is not to say that the fourteen-year-old doesn’t have issues. He does. He’s some eleven different kinds of freaky. Everyone likes to list the things that are wrong with him and it’s the worst of the gibberish. There isn’t all that much wrong with him… not apart from being fourteen. He’s kind-of stuck with that for the rest of the year.

So… anyway… A NOTE TO SO-CALLED GROWN-UPS: use age-appropriate vocabulary if you plan on addressing teenagers. Better, don’t address teenagers at all. That works far better than you’d think it does. Whatever.

It’s weird as fuck. Well… in truth, it’s far weirder than fuck because fuck just isn’t all that weird. It’s one of those pointlessly meaningless turns of phrase, that. I’ll just back up off of that one. I’ll say it’s passingly strange. It is, too… strange. I get questions.

Like… get this… folks seem to be just keen as all get out to know the name Rich Merritt used when he performed in film. Huh. When I say “keen” I mean on the order of roughly 100 inquiries per month.

You know… being just old as dirt (older than most commercially available dirt) I remember the 90s fairly well. I do. Porn is much nicer these days than it was in the 90s… never mind the 80s. It just is. I can’t fathom any sustained interest at all in what truly could pass for antique porn (though kind people will call it classic, not antique). There are one or two (or three or four) names that stand out. There are. After all… it’s not like porn in the 90s was without interest because… it’s true, this: porn is practically a freaking synonym for interest. Oh yes. Still… there must be over 100 marines doing porn of more recent vintage. Why the interest in porn from over a decade ago?

Think about that word… decade.

That’s a creepy word. Whatever.

Once upon a time there was a series of books for fine, upstanding Christian youth. There was. Still is, actually. They’re quite well-known in upstanding Christian youth circles. They are. They were written by a Mr. Bernard Palmer.

I can see how some people might be unaware of the series. Not everyone fits into the category of upstanding Christian youth. Indeed, more than a few people would never wish to have themselves characterized that way. Whatever. I’m old as dirt so have a very handy way out of that one: no one classifies me as a youth. Nope. No one classifies me as a Christian either, leastwise no one who knows me. It’s rather difficult to be a (retired) priest of a non-Christian religion and be confused for a Christian. Just as I might suspect, no one especially does, either. That’s convenient. But how might a hoary old pagan like myself have any acquaintance with these books? I’ll tell you, Sweeties.

I have friends. Quite a lot of them. I make that my business some times. I think that a worthy habit. One should have friends and (far more importantly) be a friend. More to the point, I have Gay friends and that, I think, makes all the difference. It’s a subtle difference to be sure, but subtle differences can be transformative. Think of it as the difference between H2O and H2O2… what’s one wee little atom of oxygen? Why… practically nothing. Still, I absolutely do not recommend ignoring the difference. H2O2 is a poor substitute for H2O. Totally serious. Whatever.

I know Gay people and I know straight people and I just don’t treat them all that differently. People like to imagine that I must (on account of me being a Gay Separatist and all) but I don’t. Whatever. Gay people do the “friendship thing” somewhat differently. We more or less have to and have always had to. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we’re better friends (that has been said, just not by me, at least not recently). Nope. Just different. We share experience in ways that straight people just don’t. That’s true. My straight friends have told me so and I’ll trust them on that one. They know what they’re like better than I do. Besides, I’ve seen.

So… having known just scads and scads of young Gay people from Evangelical and Pentecostal backgrounds over the years, people who very much need good friends, I’ve absorbed a great deal of experience on that score. Oh yes. The straight Evangelicals of my acquaintance (some of them are refreshingly non-toxic) are quite amazed.

“How is it you’re not a Christian after all these years?” they ask. They do, too. Something like twenty times they’ve asked.

Huh. How is it I can have been “witnessed” to by countless upstanding Christian youths and not have been thusly persuaded to become a Christian? Well, Sweeties… the question is its own answer. They were witness to all of it, not just some of it. I’ve heard. Oh yes. I know the color and scent of evil. I want little to do with it. I spend my time trying to patch together something resembling healthy people out of the wreckage that drifts ashore from that sea. Flotsam, I think it’s called… possibly jetsam. I don’t much have the heart to dissect human wreckage to that degree. Whatever. “Ye shall know them by their fruits” it says in Matthew. I’ve seen their Gay children and I know them. I know them well enough.

It’s strange and stranger… this difference between straight culture and Gay culture. People think they actually have secrets. They think I don’t know what goes on. They think no one would tell me. They told, Sweeties. Long, grisly conversations, long bemused conversations, long earnest conversations… they told, and told over and over again.

But yes… I know about Danny Orlis. That fits somewhere in between the bemused and the earnest and nowhere near the grisly. I don’t quite recommend the books, but neither do I think them harmful in themselves. One should take care what sorts of people one gives one’s money to, though. There are used bookstores. I like used bookstores.

I thought the whole Merritt thing was quite the hoot. For myself, I refuse to believe it was a simple coincidence. Nope.

It’s still casually amusing. Mind you, more than a few of the pet teenagers found it to be hysterical. They laugh and laugh. Mostly they laugh at what the marketplace thought was sexually stimulating back in the 90s. Alas, judgment goes both ways. These hollow-eyed starving youths… year after year… grasp and root and chivvy every grain of their past  they can get. I feel quite strip-mined some days but that’s alright. I did it in my own turn just as they now do. It’s one of our subtle differences: we trade oral history for oral current events and are enriched beyond imagining or calculation… even if it is sometimes heartbreaking.

Porn is much, much more interesting these days than it was in those days.

Today I can say that that peculiar arrangement that I called a marriage is, itself, twenty-four years, six months, and thirteen days old. That means my silver wedding anniversary is coming up, not that this should trouble anyone over much. There’s still plenty of time for shopping. More importantly, however, that also means that I have spent one half of my life in this marriage.

Huh.

Way back then (twenty-four years seems a lot to me) I was who I was. “Who are you?” is one of the two questions I find interesting. “What do you want?” is the other. I don’t think there are any other questions of interest, but then I don’t think there are all that many questions that aren’t some variation on the two interesting ones. I was who I was back then: the sum of all that had gone before. Ask the spousal-unit: I was odd. Whether I’m still odd is open for debate. I know lots of folks who would surely say “Oh yes… he’s an odd one.” Whatever. Today I am not at all who I was back then. Nope. Today I remain the sum of all that has gone before. Thing of it is, half of that sum has been spent with my husband. The other half wasn’t.

Technically, tomorrow and the next day and the days after that will be a trifle more interesting than today. They will. Today half of my entire life has been spent with the spousal-unit; tomorrow more than half must be thusly allocated. That will be novel. I’m looking forward to it. But I have a fondness for tipping points. Usually you only get to see them in retrospect… unless you’ve been paying attention. Today is such a point: half here, half there.

Huh.

You know… that’s just not an interesting question. I’m frightfully confused by people who can’t tell the difference between gay and straight. I mean… it’s freaking self-evident. I’m also confused by people who just can’t wrap their wee little brains around the concept of “bi.” There are bisexuals in the world.

There are two fundamental characteristics (you can call them essential if you want to… or not) to being what some people indelicately refer to as “a gay:” Sexual desire for people of the same sex and a lack of sexual desire for people of the opposite sex. If both of those things aren’t the case for you then you just aren’t “a gay.”

I know a fellow or three who would take exception to that. They seem to think they can call themselves whatever they want to. They can, too. So can I. I can claim my cat is a dog if I want to… that just won’t make it so. That’s what you call a delusion. I don’t recommend being willfully delusional.

Now… this really is not an interesting question. That it’s not interesting does not make it not fundamental… it most assuredly is fundamental… it’s just not interesting. All the interesting characteristics of Gay people arise as consequences of that fundamental difference. These consequences are quite common… ubiquitous, even… but they aren’t essential. An essential characteristic is definitive, shared by all members of the stated class. Guys who want to have sex with guys instead of gals are Gay. Ditto with gals who want to have sex with gals instead of guys… they’re Gay too (though not too many of them use that word.) Everyone else just isn’t Gay; they’re something else. Theyr’e allowed to be something else. They’re even allowed to make up their own word for whichever flavor of ‘something else’ they fancy.

What happened to “Boyfriend Monday?”

Nothing happened to it. No one has brought me any puzzles in boyfriending lately. Were someone to bring me a puzzle in boyfriending I would most likely offer my opinions (for what they’re worth). I might save it for a Monday and I might not… I’ve been fickle lately. But no one wants my advice on boyfriending these days and I’m totally fine with that.

What’s the mission of your blog?

Ummmm… it hasn’t got one?

Sweetie, read closely: it’s typing. It doesn’t have a mission and it doesn’t need one. It’s a place where I jot down the occasional thought and fling it out into the world where most anyone can see it.

If you think Pride Season starts on May 21, when do you think it ends?

Hold up… back right the fuck off of that “think” crap. I don’t “think” Pride Season starts with the anniversary of the White Night Riots followed by Harvey Milk’s birthday… that’s when I start it. There’s a difference. I end my observation of Pride Season with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots… June 28 and 29.

Fiercefully?

Yes.

Don’t let anyone browbeat you into thinking that ‘fiercefully’ isn’t a word. It most assuredly is a word. It’s a very old word. Folks haven’t used it with any regularity for a good long time… centuries, actually. Whatever.

It’s a proper English word.

Lots of folks might also point out that it’s probably not the word you want to use. They’re likely right.

Generally speaking, when someone has the inclination to use the word ‘fiercefully,’ they really want to use either ‘fiercely’ or ‘ferociously.’

There is a difference between being fierce and being fierceful. There is a difference between doing something fiercely and doing it fiercefully. If you don’t know, don’t understand, or cannot grasp the difference… use fierce and fiercely. Really. I’m up for living life fiercefully though. It’s not that I don’t value fierceness (because I totally do). It’s that I value fiercefulness more (and that’s saying something, seeing as how I already value fierceness.)

People should try somewhat harder to remember that English is a remarkably fluid language. English has absorbed vast blocks of words from any language that didn’t run fast enough. Then there are those paroxysms of word fabrication. Periodically, novel words just start getting used. It seems to me that English cannot abide the unnamed phenomenon. If there is a thing, there must be a word in English for that thing. After that, usage makes it so.

Fiercefully… really.

I would like to propose to the entire worldwide gay community that they cancel gay pride events until we have marriage equality. All those thousands of people who go to gay pride, those are bodies that could put on a shirt and go into the neighborhood and tell their story. We should wait until we have equality to have our party. In the meantime we volunteer the same passion and air miles and participation and really channel that same participation into our fight for equality.

That’s not me. Oh no… that’s Reed Cowan. He proposed that, not me.

Now… I’m hardly what you might call “the entire wordwide gay community.” Nope. I’m just me. Speaking as “Just Me,” however, it’s hardly difficult to respond.

NO.

The proposal is rejected, the request denied.

Pride is just one party. It has its purpose and its reasons. True, some Prides encompass more than one day… whatever. Pride Season as a whole isn’t that much more than a single month (and few people stretch it beyond the month of June, even though I think they ought to.) In any event, it hardly cripples efforts to accomplish this, that, or any other thing.

It seems every year someone hops up on the soapbox and starts declaiming about how Pride ought to be this or that or turned to some pet cause or other. Lots of people get it into their heads to subvert Pride. They see all those people and start scheming how they can snatch the crowds up for their own uses.

Yeah.

Whatever.

I note that no one has yet had any measure of success.

Here’s the deal: if you want to throw a party, send out the invitations, put some music on, and see how it turns out. If not so many people turn up, don’t go casting covetous eyes on someone else’s party.

The world doesn’t work that way.

Let’s break down gay stereotypes by wearing rainbow thongs and feather headdresses on glitter-covered floats.

Huh. You know… I like sarcasm. I do. It’s right up there with Swiss Meringue and chocolate in my list of “Best Things Ever.” I’m not so fond of errant stupidity… or blinding arrogance. Whatever. Given the shocking abundance of stupidity and arrogance (often both wrapped up into one grisly packet) it’s really a Very Good Thing that Swiss Meringues are so very easy to make.

Consider, if you will (just for a moment… it doesn’t hurt all that much), that someone wearing a rainbow thong and a feather headdress on a glitter-covered float is engaged in some activity other than breaking down gay stereotypes. Think that might just be possible? It was a trick question, Sweeties. Of course it’s fucking possible.

Believe it or not, this “break down gay stereotypes” shit just doesn’t figure very high on the “Things To Do” list of some people. I, for example, have absolutely no inclination to do anything of the sort. Nope. Not me.

Now… this glitter-covered float nonsense:

You forgot the naked or nearly naked glitter-covered go-go boys. Those make a float. Rainbow thongs are OK (if you must… I do realize that nudity just isn’t legal in some jurisdictions) but the feather headdresses are only appropriate on really very large, well-muscled go-go boys and that’s a problem.

In my experience, the really very large, well-muscled go-go boys can’t dance all that well and a go-go boy that can’t dance isn’t very… go-go. The best go-go boys are the medium-sized, moderately-muscled sort (or out and out twinks). Feather headdresses do not look right on small people… only large people. Headdresses are positively forbidden on twinks.

So… you wear the headdress and let the go-go boys wear glitter and mineral oil. The world will be a much, much better place for it. Seriously.

Also… the music. I’m wanting E-Thunder or Ander Standing. I just am. You need the boom-boom. I’m getting right sick and tired of all the limp-dicked music this year. “Boom” does not mean “bang” and it certainly doesn’t mean “whack,” “clack,” or (for the love of a good fuck) “tack.” A drum track should not be indistinguishable from the ticking of a large clock. That’s obscene. “Boom” means “boom.”

Boom-boom should shake windows. Ideally, it should shatter windows but I’m not holding out any hope for that.

That’s an oddly comforting sentence… what with that nifty little “is.” It’s not in the past tense. I have to, you see, grow accustomed to using the word “was.” Like this:

‘Berto was the first friend I made online. Entirely coincidentally, he was the first of my online friends to up and die. I’m fairly certain ‘Berto’s thoughts on that would be, “Whoo-hoo! FIRST!” He could be like that. I’m not feeling all that ‘whoo-hoo’ about it.

‘Berto and I disagreed quite often. Indeed, we disagreed rather spectacularly at times. Eight years of spectacular disagreement is the sort of thing that changes your life, so the termination of all of that comes as a less than welcome change. I don’t much care for change and I certainly don’t care for this one.

Still… all people die. No exceptions. ‘Berto’s death is hardly surprising. Oh no. That he delayed it until this year is the more surprising bit. To say he had been “quite ill” for some time is a tad of an understatement. Seriously.

One day, some time ago, ‘Berto toddled into an emergency room. Says the physician: “What the hell are you doing alive?” Yeah. Lucky for me (and… sure… ‘Berto) the physician was quite the handy tradesman (NOT something I have the pleasure of saying about physicians very often). One coronary arrest, two strokes, and a pulmonary embolism later, ‘Berto is back to a somewhat diminished routine and we all got to enjoy his observations and commentary for another year and more. “Enjoy” might not be the right word for “all” of us. I quite enjoyed ‘Berto. There were others who found him more trying than did I. Whatever.

But no. It is no surprise that ‘Berto died. It’s surprising that he lived. Here, too… whatever.

‘Berto was loud. He was raucous. ‘Bombastic’ isn’t really a word I would apply to him because he was more often than not just livid. Rage was an emotion that was close to his heart. That, and indignation. ‘Berto was shockingly skilled at being indignant. You could say (and I shall do so) that ‘Berto loved being pissed off. He spent a great deal of time doing so and talking (more than occasionally shrieking) about it. His outrage was a trifle distracting and, in conversation about this, that, or some other event that has tweeked his pique, I (or others) would have the occasion to point out some observation about the event that he had missed and indignation would blossom into high dudgeon. ‘Berto was very, very good at outrage. This would be because he had so much practice… what with the world being so very outrageous. ‘Berto had a lot to be pissed off about and he ranted against it all.

And now it’s quiet. He was ‘under the weather’ for three days and then he died… on 6 June (or so I’m told). This matters because the first three days were just ‘Berto not feeling well. This has happened just dozens of times over the eight years that I’ve known him. The last three days, though… that’s the silence of being dead, the silence that just isn’t going to stop.

Sometimes a young hooligan traipses down the street and snatches at the flowers in your flower box. We have no shortage of young hooligans in the neighborhood of the Tree House and I’ve seen: sometimes the hooligans rip off wads of foliage and sprinkle bits of your flowers along the sidewalk and sometimes the whole plant is ripped free. There’s this gap in the flower box, a hole where there used to be a plant.

The world has a hole in it now. Lots of people miss ‘Berto… enough that there’s going to be a headstone and a memorial service when a more proper version of summer reaches the mountains ‘Berto called home. In itself, this is a fine thing and a testament to the kind of person ‘Berto was. Like most Gay men, ‘Berto had little use for what people generally called “his family.” ‘Berto assembled a new family, one far more worthy of the name than that other assemblage of creatures. There are those who might worry that those creatures might haul the pitiable remains of a fine man back to some wretched place and bury them under some cross. ‘Berto would surely be counted among them, were he alive; this is not something he would have wanted. Indeed, it’s something he would have raged for weeks, even months about. It’s almost certainly not going to happen. His friends are taking care of all that.

There’s still this hole, though… a hole where ‘Berto used to be. No hooligans caused it. There’s no umbrage here. A man with an illness died of that illness as ill men have often done. He left a hole, when he died, ‘Berto did… a great big hole made entirely out of silence.

Folks who knew ‘Berto can remember him as they will, but I have one wee, tiny suggestion:

Make some noise.

It’s too quiet. There must be ten thousand things that ‘Berto would be wailing and cursing about right now (were he able to wail and curse, which he is not). The silence just will not do.

Make more noise.

There has been some subtle persuasion for me to start Pride Season a tad earlier but it’s not working. May 17 was the International Day Against Homophobia, you see. That’s fine. It’s not like I didn’t note the passage of the International Day Against Homophobia because I did. I just don’t consider it part of Pride Season. All decent people oppose homophobia and you just don’t get to apply the word “decent” to yourself if you’re homophobic. You also don’t get to declare yourself “not homophobic.” Oh no, Sweeties… you need references for that shit. No one cares how many times a homophobe can deny being a homophobe. I’m too cranky to start Pride Season with the International Day Against Homophobia. I class it with Mother’s Day… there’s nothing wrong with it, plenty right with it, and I observe it, but I won’t call it part of Pride Season.

Nope.

I start Pride Season with the White Night riots.

That was 31 years ago.

Tomorrow shall be the anniversary of Harvey Milk’s birthday. I shall be celebrating that, as well. There was a marked contrast between the two days thirty-one years ago and there properly ought to be a marked contrast between the two anniversaries.

I get to have all manner of interaction (verbal and otherwise) with the other hapless drones. Yup.

And I get to say the “Ancient spirits of evil” thingie. That’s always a good time… saying the “Ancient spirits of evil” thingie. I do a half-decent Mumm-ra.

Can’t do the squealing at the end, though. Nope. See… back when I was a youngster, had someone told me (quite truthfully) that I shouldn’t smoke because smoking would surely impair my ability to do the wicked cackle at the end of the “Ancient spirits of evil” thingie, I’d likely have quit smoking. Likely.

Whatever.

The gig comes with a 50% pay increase, and that’s just a whole lot better than getting poked in the eye with a stick. Alas, in exchange for that moderately transformative pay increase I shall have to interact much more closely with that species of wickedness known as servers. Ick. Ah, well… that’s what the “Ancient spirits of evil” thingie is for.

Minus the admittedly cool-ass chortling at the end ‘cuz I totally can’t do that.

I’m just going to screech instead. I imagine that sounds far too much like Divine in an acid-influenced remake of Night of the Living Dead for comfort… which is fine.