The other day on Facebook I posted that I had just participated in the wackiest thing I had ever participated in and was still unable to pick myself up off the floor from laughing so hard. One of my Facebook friends is frantic to know what happened, so to you, Dan K., this goes out to help you just calm the heck down! Also, I have another friend who gently chastised me recently for not updating my blog, thus keeping her in the dark about what’s been going on in my life. So, Laura S., this goes out to you, as well!
And now:
My Internet Hook-Up
By Joe Lopez
There is something about me that most people who know me don’t know about me. It isn’t some horrible, dark secret full of shame and self loathing. I think 2% of my friends know about it. Or… maybe it’s only two of my friends. I’ve never discussed it with my family, though if this information could be used for maximum shock value, I’d let them in on it in a heartbeat. I suspect that every one of my gay male friends, upon disclosure, would only nod, shrug and, if they didn’t move on to an equally earth-shattering topic like the weather or what’s for lunch, would just need to know a couple of details (Was it hot? Was he hot? What site is this so I can check out his profile?) before admitting that they, too, have done it and by the way… who hasn’t? The secret’s no big deal. It just doesn’t often come up, say, at the PTA meeting or with your coworkers around the Friday afternoon pot luck or in the middle of a yoga class (“Exhale, come into Downward Facing Dog and oh, by the way, did you know…”).
I have, on occasion, had internet sex.
Okay, well, “on occasion”… it’s been twice. Three times if you count that time my friend (let’s call him “Dirk”) Dirk shared a video of himself doing a naughty dance in front of his video cam.
Now, if you feel yourself blushing or getting all flustered, first of all remember that your heart medication is in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and also… jeez, join the 21st century! Internet sex is very now, very progressive. Even, according to various media outlets at various times when they feel that parents need a jolt of fear struck into their hearts, your teenage children are doing it. Your 14 year old son is doing it right now. Why do you think he takes his laptop into the bathroom? He ain’t reading The Saturday Evening Post in there!
Most often, my internet sex activity basically amounts to internet heavy petting. A guy starts an IM session, we exchange stupid, awkward banter like “Hey. What’s up? You’re cute / sexy / hot” until we finally find our way to the inevitable “I’m so horny,” which usually feels to me like someone’s just unwrapped a dead fish and slapped it down on the table. Now, why would you wanna go and do that? We were having a great conversation, swapping scintillating banalities and you pull that thing out of your virtual pants.
But lately, because I’m on a mad, desperate search for my next boyfriend, I’ve been more agreeable to indulging in the stupid banter, even up to and beyond the dead fish moment. In fact, my dead fish moment has even been pushed back to the point when they ask me to send them naked pictures of myself. I always apologize and claim that I don’t have any, sorry, I’m just too proper to have done that, and I always punctuate the sentence with :( (even though I totally have naked pictures of myself. Who doesn’t these days?). I’m so amenable to playing the internet dating game lately that I recently, even without a cam on my own computer, got some guy off, typing how hot he was, how hard I was and yeah, I totally came, too, dude, ah yeah, man, all the while remaining fully clothed, zipped all the way up, chowing down on a handful of those mini cinnamon rolls from Costco and playing a game of Chess Titans in another Microsoft window.
So I know the game. I even know the rules of the game and have opted to play. Which is why the exchange I partook in on Monday night caught me so off guard and why, three days later, I find myself caught up in inappropriately timed giggling fits over what happened. It was so unexpected, and weird and wacky. And I’ll warn you, dear reader, right now: nothing about what follows is a euphemism.
On Monday morning, I was in front of my computer doing some administrative work for my Purple Cat Yoga business (oh yeah, if you didn’t know because it’s been a year since I updated my blog, I totally started my own LLC called Purple Cat Yoga and I’m busy with putting email lists together, marketing strategies, ordering business cards and… but… I digress) and had decided to stay logged on to Facebook and Connexion.org (in case any MUST READ status changes broke out on Facebook, or any cute guys with black hair and blue eyes named Clark Kent wanted to IM me on Connexion). I’m working away, listening to playlists on Windows Media Player, when a Connexion chat window opens up. It’s from Jack (not his real name, in order to protect the innocent… and the embarrassed), and he’s lobbed the ubiquitous “Hey. What’s up?” onto the playing field.
Ah. The game is afoot.
We swap a couple of scintillating banalities, but my curiosity is peaked because he starts to sprinkle multi-syllabic words into the exchange. He asks questions that make it evident he’s read my profile (he can both read and comprehend the written word! Huzzah!). And so far, he seems interested in me for my mind. After ten minutes of back and forth, there hasn’t even been the slightest scent of any dead fish. He asks me about being a yoga instructor and he’s appreciably titillated by the notion of teaching naked yoga. He asks the usual question about erections and makes the standard self-effacing comments about his physical limitations, and then I ask him about his profession. And it’s right here where the wonderfully wacky weirdness begins.
He tells me that he’s not as passionate about his job as I am about mine. Which is weird, because his profile says he’s an actor (we’re not at the wacky part yet), and to be an actor, particularly a working actor, I always assume there must be some passion involved in that. So I ask him about his job. He’s currently appearing in a show with a children’s theater group (still not at the wacky part) that’s touring around. He indicates that the show is really nothing more to him than a paycheck, and I ask him what his role is (wait for it…). He tells me that he’s the guy in the show who takes a pie in the face. His job involves taking a pie in the face twice in every show he does, once at the end of act one, and once later in the show, which is performed at least twice per day. The awesomeness of this bit of information is, I think, unmatched, because I have never met anyone online or in person who’s job description involves the phrase “take pie in face”. WACKY!
It is one of those gems of information you come across from time to time in life as you meet new people that make you think “I have, honestly, never heard that come out of anyone’s mouth (or keyboard) ever before.” And it’s a delightful surprise! It totally rates up there with the guy with whom I was scheduling a time to meet who told me he couldn’t meet on one particular occasion because his mom’s llama was sick, and he had to wait for the vet. I laughed when I heard that. Not because the poor llama was sick, but because how often do you hear that? “My mom’s llama.”
So I tell Jack that this is totally cracking me up (lots of “LOL!” started to pepper my end of the conversation), his job description. He tells me he’s glad his humiliation is so entertaining for me and I admit that yes, yes it is. We talk about the show and how the pies are real pies (banana cream) purchased from a local bakery with maximum splat potential in mind, and that every pie he takes to the face is delivered with great gusto by the actor in the role opposite him, to the great delight and screaming laughter of the 5-10 year old target audience.
In that way of certain topics of conversation (the atrocity of minivan owners’ driving habits, who makes the better Star Trek starship captain, your undying lust for the entire male cast of True Blood) Jack and I find ourselves running with the pie-in-the-face ball, unable to let it go. We start to delve into all the permutations of this staged event, the slapstick history of it, how it’s used in the show as Jack’s character’s comeuppance for being annoying, the humiliation of it, the hilarity of the humiliation of it. I keep giggling and laughing out loud, literally and in print (LOL!) because this has got to be one of the most absurdist conversations I’ve ever had (barring those years of working in bookstores, discussing with customers that one book they’re looking for that they don’t know the title of, the author of, the subject of, but they know it’s got a blue cover with a man on it). I get the sense from Jack that he’s both bemused and highly amused that I’m so thoroughly entertained by the fact that he has to take a pie in the face so often. He says to me that he wishes he could videotape it for me so that I could just watch it over and over again on a loop. Unfortunately, he types with regret, he’s not allowed to film the production. Jack suggests that he could, he supposes, film it with his cam at home.
And right here is where we unwittingly begin to fashion the Frankenstein’s monster of wackiness that we eventually ended up with.
Because when he suggests this, in my mind I thought of all those pictures posted on the internet of cute guys in front of their bathroom mirrors, camera phone in one hand, their other hand lifting their shirts to show off their abs, or pulling their pants down just enough to show off that defined line from their hips down toward their pubic hair, or to just go for the gold and grab onto their erection. And the idea that Jack might post such a picture, substituting his sex appeal in the free hand with a banana cream pie knocked me out of my seat and made me ROTFLMAO. Furthermore, the thought of him filming it, filming himself giving the camera the usual pouting and sighing and bouncing eyebrows, “hey there, how you doing?” and then, instead of jerking off he reveals the banana cream pie and his climax isn’t a huge spurt of semen… it’s doing a face plant into the banana cream pie! This cracked me up no end! When I typed all this into the IM screen, Jack was taken aback. “I wasn’t thinking of doing it myself,” he types to me. “I meant having someone do it to me, like in the show.” But, he has to admit to me, that thought of pieing himself in the face is also hilarious. And then he has to log off, and I need to log off, but before we go, we make a date for later that night. He says he’ll meet me back here at Connexion later. When he will actually do it, pie himself in the face, because I double dog dared him to do it.
All through the rest of Monday I giggled about this, thereby starting this process still going on of giggling at inappropriate times. Because I just can’t believe I made a date to watch a guy on his computer cam push a banana cream pie into his face. Later that night, after teaching a yoga class, out at dinner with some of the guys from class, I start giggling uncontrollably. Luckily, someone at the table had just said something funny, but it triggered the thought of this date I’d set and I couldn’t stop laughing. I had another bout of the giggles on the way home. I’d forgotten about this date for a while, talking about other things at dinner, and then on the way home, driving along I-25, I suddenly burst into laughter when I remembered I had an internet hook up that night. Yeah, baby, to watch a cute guy do a face plant into a pie. That’s so hot.
When I got home, I logged on to Connexion and there was Jack, waiting for me. After a bit of hemming and hawing to get me signed in to Yahoo to better view his cam, there he was, in a video feed that was a bit choppy, but there he was, live. Because my computer isn’t set up with video and audio (so? I have naked pictures of myself and I’ve had internet sex… I can’t keep up with every trend!), we swapped phone numbers so that he could hear my laughter when what we were both here for happened.
“So,” he says over the phone.
“So,” I reply. “Is the pie there?”
“The pie is here,” he says, and in the video he holds it up to the camera so I can see it. Oh, it’s a big one! I didn’t expect it to be so big. It’s even in a real pie tin. “So, how do you want to do this?” Jack asks me. “Should I just go for it, or should we chat a little first?”
“Oh,” I tell Jack, “we should chat a little bit first because when you go for it, you’re gonna be a mess.” And I’m off on a fit of the giggles because there should be an erect penis somehow involved in this scenario, but there’s not, and there’s not even going to be, and for God’s sake, he ACTUALLY went out and bought a banana cream pie!
Which he sets down out of camera view for now. We share some polite conversation. He asks how my yoga class went. We cover some of the same ground we covered earlier in the day, except now I get inflection and I can hear him laugh. He delivers his jokes and sense of humor in a dry way. It’s sort of unfair that I get to both see and hear him as he moves in little jerks in the cam window in the middle of my screen, while he only gets to hear me. But the evening is wearing on and he’s on the east coast and the time comes when we either need to do this thing, or we need to sign off. So we do this thing.
“Are you ready?” he asks me. “Are you?” I ask back, because after all, he’s the one who’s about to make a complete mess out of himself. He says “Yeah” and the banana cream pie rises back into view. Jack looks at the pie and keeps repeating “I can’t believe I’m about to do this. I really can’t believe I’m about to do it.” I start egging him on, though. “You can do it. Go on. Just… do it. Do it like pulling off a band-aid, all in one quick motion.”
And then he does it!
So… he uses his right hand to do it. The pie is in his hand and then in one video feed jerk, his hand is up to his face, with the pie tin between his hand and his face. In another video cam jerk, the pie is lowered and Jack… is a complete mess! Pieces of pie crust are stuck to his face. Pie filling is in his hair. There’s a ring of whipped cream around his pie-splattered head. All I can hear over the phone is him moaning over and over “Oh man, oh, oh, oh my God, oh man.” And I’m … LAUGHING!!! This is fucking hilarious! It’s absurd and weird and wacky and this man needs to be my best friend forever RIGHT NOW! In so many ways this has endeared him to me. And in so many ways this way trumps any dick shot any day. Any guy can whip out his dick and show it to you. Not every guy’s willing to whip out a pie and shove it into his own face for you.
Jack’s still groaning in disbelief or revulsion or shock, perhaps at how low he has fallen for the sake of his art, or for the sake of impressing a new guy. What a pie whore he is! Or maybe the moaning is about the mess he’s gonna have to clean up now. He says to me “Oh my God, there’s pie all over the floor. Oh man, I really went for it. I really shoved it into my face just like it gets shoved in my face in the show.” And he’s endeared to me a little more because he was willing to make the sacrifice and deliver the blow with the same force as he meets in each performance! What a guy! Jack looks at the pie plate in his hand and says “There’s still pie left. Should I do it again? Do you want me to do it again?”
Are you kidding? Does Oliver Twist want more gruel? Do Lesbians show up to the second date with a U-Haul? Do the Village People want me in the navy? OF COURSE I want Jack to do it again! AND HE DOES!!! For a moment pie completely obliterates his face, and then crust and filling slip to the unseen floor, slowly revealing Jack’s huge smile and blinking eyes.
This has been the best internet hook up ever. Jack says he’s gonna go take a shower and clean up. I laugh some more and tell him that if he’s ever in Colorado, I totally owe him a dinner, at least, for this evening’s entertainment. He cracks that he’ll skip dessert at that dinner. We say goodnight and sign off. It’s one o’clock in the morning I can now go to bed, completely satisfied.
The End.
So, to you, Dan, I hope that your burning curiosity has been sated and that it was well worth the wait.
And to you, Laura, now you’ve been updated on what I’ve been doing with my life.
This summer I watched the dissolution of my marriage tear apart everything around it like a tornado sucking up the trailer park of my life, leaving behind scattered jagged debris and a toilet leaning drunkenly atop a pile of rubble that used to be the post office.But I was brave.And stoic.I thanked God that I was alive and had my health.I sought meaning and learning out of the experience and tried to be all Dr. Phil and Eckhart Tolle and Yoda about the whole ordeal and I moved in with my brother and niece into their just-off-the-golf-course suburban sanctuary.I swam at the clubhouse pool.I took long and longer bike rides on the paths through Open Spaces between nearby cities.If the green spaces between Westminster and Broomfield, Colorado can be considered exotic, then this summer I visited exotic locales.I saw more prairie dogs this summer than I have ever seen in my whole life.Rabbits, too. Road kill, too.My PTSD from the breakup snuck up on me and I had a couple of emotional outbursts.During one, I broke the chair I used with my writing desk.During another, I demolished the paper tray I had in my bedroom.But what are those losses compared to a broken heart, a broken, bleeding soul?I got melodramatic this summer.
I moped and whined about my unemployment and my broken relationship.I regressed 18 years and rediscovered the agony and the ecstasy of masturbating desperately, silently in my room behind closed doors so that the family wouldn’t know.I moped in front of the computer while I searched for jobs I didn’t want and jobs I totally wanted for which I was wholly unqualified.I discovered the joy of Facebook quizzes and soon thereafter discovered the let-down of being bored by Facebook quizzes.I watched the entire cast of Six Feet Under die and I wept openly and then moped and wore a lot of black listening to the song at the end of the final episode on repeat for hour upon hour – and I’m listening to it still.
I sought solace in yoga classes and found solace in the surrender of yin yoga, the balance of hand stands and the bare chest of the hot little stud muffin in my Thursday night classes.I thought about dating and filled out a bunch of personals profiles online but then realized there was no way in hell I was emotionally ready for putting up with other guys’ little quirks.I thought about committing suicide but couldn’t figure out which was the best method to carry it out.I thought about going back to church and finding God but ha ha ha… whatever.I applied for unemployment benefits and my spirits soared at the prospect of unemployment benefits kicking in some relief from my financial ruin, but the unemployment benefits department of Colorado had other ideas about that.They balked at paying me because I quit one job of my own volition, the job that fired me refuted my claim of being fired, I didn’t look for enough work one week, I didn’t fill out the right form on the right day during the right weather pattern, I smelled funny, I didn’t eat enough fiber, I didn’t wash with the right detergent, I drank too much caffeine, I ate too much fat, I was Mexican.I have still not received one red cent from fucking unemployment benefits.I flipped off every letter I received from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
I moped.I drowned my sorrows in downloading hot naked pictures of men off the internet and getting lost in Angela’s angst on My So Called Life.I stayed up until 3 in the morning playing Zombie Fluxx at I-Hop with Diane and chatting with Dean online.I wrote exhaustive poems about English moors, vampires, black roses and sad clowns making pancakes for naked girls under tables in flats overlooking the Champs Elysees.I burned all the poems.
I went to the mountains and felt at one with the trees and the wind, the rabbits and the potential elk and the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park.I went to the zoo and reached oneness with the wolf and the slow lori, the peacock mother and her chick, and the howler monkey scratching its butt while hanging on the fence in front of its habitat, showing its privates to the crowd.I ate red meat at barbecues like a true blue, redneck, heterosexual, patriotic American male.I grunted and got sarcastic.I shook my groove thing at Pridefest in Denver like a true blue, sequin-striped, homosexual, patriotic American male.I giggled and got sarcastic.I disciplined my self-proclaimed “angry boy” four year old nephew and garnered his nascent resentment and desire for revenge, sweet, sweet revenge against the oppressive adult regime.After three months of unemployed moping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I finally landed a temp data entry job and now get paid $12 an hour to mope, wail and gnash my teeth in front of a computer doing soul crushing, mind numbing tedium.
Heading home on my bike one night along a lonely country road in the serene respite after the burst of a Colorado summer downpour, I hit a snake in the road.I was crushed.But not as crushed as the snake writhing in agony in the gutter.I stood over its poor body twisting and rasping against the pavement at the side of the road and thought “This is exactly the state of my life right now.”
The question of what career I want to pursue feels like being nine years old, standing on the rock that overhangs the local swimming hole, wet from swimming down below, shivering in wet trunks, wet hair hanging in your eyes, towel clutched around your shoulders. You’re on the verge of running full bore out along the rock to leap off the end of it but… you can’t. You just… can’t. In spite of everyone else having done it, your friends and the older kids leaving you behind, taking the leap and they’re all in the water below, splashing each other and laughing that high pitched laugh that characterizes this as the best time of their lives ever. Some of them stripped their swimsuits off and leapt naked, daring, unselfconscious and you want to join them. Because they’re calling your name and they’re starting to mock you. But your chest is tight and you’re on the verge of tears because you just can’t unhitch your feet from this spot and you clutch your towel like something that flimsy could give you the strength to just do it or the strength to be satisfied staying right where you are. You remain on the verge of taking that leap. You saw the other kids do it, you can hear that none of them died. None of them are broken or bleeding or screaming in agony. You can almost taste the leap into midair and be, for a few seconds, free-falling, in flight, suspended in a moment of pure adrenaline until you smack into the cool water and sink for a few seconds in a world where you’re alone in silence with your joy and the electricity zigzagging through your chest, groin, legs, and throat until you break through the surface, back into summer heat and surrounded by the cheers and back smacking fraternity of those who proceeded you. And maybe you’re even naked.
You know it would be sweet and make the moment of hesitation and fear right before you jumped so insignificant as to be forgotten entirely. You could accept that moment and love and forgive yourself your hesitation. But you remain in that moment, fixed, shivering and unable to fathom what, precisely, is keeping you here. And part of you longs for one of the older kids, one of the teenagers, to put his strong arm around your shoulders and tell you that it’s okay if you don’t jump because it is scary. It scared him, too, and he couldn’t do it until he was 12. But no one’s coming back up to offer any advice or consolation. Even if they did, you wouldn’t feel better because the fact would remain that you humiliated yourself in front of everyone by not being able to do it. And you’re not sure how you’ll face everyone on the way home because they’ll all seem wiser and more mature because of the code they cracked and the knowledge they have that you don’t seem to be able to tap into. And as you walk home, no one will explain it to you because to all of them it was so self evident how to run, leap and go for a swim. They wouldn’t even know where to begin to instruct you on how to do it yourself because they can’t even conceive of not being able to do it because for them there is no piece missing that, once it fell into place, would’ve propelled you out over the edge of the rock.
I couldn’t sleep at all Thursday night.I woke up out of one of those dreams that leaves you wondering where dream ends and reality begins.Then I couldn’t just drift back to sleep.I had too much music, too many snatches of dialogue from DVD’s I’d watched earlier that evening, and too many lists of niggling concerns that have peppered my emotional landscape since arriving in Colorado running through my head, whispering in the dark.And the dream I had gave the empty, dark house around me the feel that someone was downstairs, standing against the light of a window where I would realize that the shadow was human shaped just before I felt his knife slide elegantly and fatally into my gut.So I rolled over and cuddled Figaro, who was asleep at the foot of my bed.But listening to his contented purring didn’t settle my buzzing brain or hyped up body.
So at 2 o’clock in the morning, I got up.I got online, thinking that would bore me enough to put me back to sleep, but after an hour of checking email and reading blogs, I still couldn’t shut down.The house still felt invaded.There were chores to be done.My money’s running out and unemployment benefits aren’t kicking in as soon as I’d like them to.I wanted to have someone in bed with me to kiss, arouse and nuzzle against to breath in his scent and have him murmur assurances against my neck. And there was a full moon in the sky, beckoning me to be out in the open night air.
I got dressed and grabbed my keys.I got in my car and drove under the full moon’s guidance across country roads that weave around and avoid the cities I live near now: Erie, Longmont, and Boulder.I kept to the dark.I put the same few slow, quiet, sad, but energizing songs on repeat on my CD player, songs that provide the perfect accompaniment to driving on empty highways under clear, starry skies.
I drove through all the ghosts of myself haunting the Boulder county landscape.I considered the juxtaposition of my present self and them and how they never felt truly a part of the dominant Colorado culture (I’ve never been one for hay, sports and sweatshirts with cross-stitched kittens emblazoned across the chest).So my present self hadn’t wanted to come back here.But I did it for love.I did it for commitments I vowed to at an altar in a church in Denver in front of family and friends in a ceremony that continued to live in my heart until its final death by fire in anger at the end of April.I came back for noble reasons.But I didn’t want to.Because of ghosts I wanted to keep buried so that they didn’t undermine who I’d become in Seattle, because Joe in Seattle was all geeked out super witty faggot yoga boy.Joe in Seattle was cool.
As I drove, I looked all those ghosts face to face.Joe sneaking out of the house on summer nights like this one to bike to the local public swimming pool to hop the fence for skinny-dipping.Joe when I wrote prayers to the Virgin Mary in my diary to lend me the strength to resist masturbating for at least one week.Mary and I would start out small and work up gradually to complete abstinence purity.I remembered being freaked out the first time I ejaculated during masturbation.I immediately thought it was some kind of sexual disease.Or like I broke my dick.Oh my God!Pus is coming out of my dick!I had no idea what was happening because I grew up in a family that didn’t talk about these things.
I thought about the first boy I ever fell in love with in high school, even before I had the vocabulary to identify myself as queer.I still remember how he smelled kind of like fresh laundry and hair gel.I thought about my infatuation with a coworker whose eyes were the color of mint chocolate-chip ice cream when they add coloring to make it green.I thought about men I’d dated.Eric, who remains the most beautiful man I dated.Preston who was sweet and uncomplicated and had the biggest dick I’ve ever had the pleasure of trying to go down on.And the man I committed to, Jim, who in spite of everything I still love, even though he’s never read a word of this blog.
I have become obsessed with this one particular song, so I played it on repeat more than any other song as I drove.It’s quiet.It’s sad, about hurting and longing.It played over the final sequence of the series finale of Six Feet Under which made me cry like I’ve never cried for any series finale.Not even Buffy, if Buffy had ended at the fifth season.I think this song is the perfect accompaniment to driving.Maybe because it played over images of Claire Fisher leaving L.A. in her new Prius and heading east.Which is sort of what I did, headed east, leaving Seattle for Denver.It’s a moment, a decision I’ve relived and regretted and wished I could take back so many times.When the car was repossessed, when my temp agency fudged my pay, when my temp assignment bombarded us new employees with negative reinforcement, when Jim couldn’t fit me into his schedule and didn’t include me in skiing plans, weekends in the mountains, and a vacation in Mexico when people invited him to those excursions, when the drunk driver hit us head on going the wrong way down a one-way street.But I cannot ever undo the moment when I committed to moving back to Denver.The moment, like Nate tells Claire at the end of Six Feet Under, was gone even as it started.
Even so, as I drove, I thought about all that has been lost.I’ve heard that 2009, numeralogically or astrologically or according to the Mayan calendar or something, is a year of completion, a time when cycles complete to make way for new things to manifest.I have had much in the first nine months of being back in Colorado come to an end.My life in Seattle.My high paying job in Seattle.I came here and saw the dissolution, which, admittedly, was probably a long time coming, of my fifteen year marriage.In December, I put my nose behind Savannah’s ears, breathed in her scent and kissed her there for the last time before ending her life and leaving her weary little body on the vet’s stainless steel table.That moment was also one of the last moments of emotional intimacy that Jim and I shared.
As I turned my car west, toward the mountains, I reflected on how many experiences have all built on one another to bring me to this moment, to another late night, aimless drive around Boulder county.All the school assignments, family fights, holidays, school field trips, high school dances, speech team meets, college all-nighters, birthday parties, broken hearts, bookstore jobs, bank jobs (jobs at banks… not robbing banks), the flirting that went right over my head, moves from so many apartments, vacations, the sexual discoveries I wanted to revisit and perfect, the sexual discoveries I never wanted to mention ever again, poems and short stories and, so far, incomplete novels, petty arguments, joyous triumphs, endings and beginnings, all the memories racing along the night highway with me, bringing me up to the present uncertainties.
Sia’s “Breathe Me” starts over yet again.I almost ran over a rabbit as it darted into the street.I passed a deer with large antlers casually walking along the sidewalk outside one of north Boulder’s neighborhoods.The full moon became haloed as hazy clouds passed in front of it, and the eastern sky began to lighten.After an hour of driving, I turned the car east, back toward home.I found no answers.I don’t know when the next job will come through.The dishes still needed to be done.The laundry still needed to be folded and ironed.The cat litter still needed to be scooped out.I still didn’t know if these things constituted living a full life.I still wasn’t sure if all that preceded me to the moment driving back to Erie, Colorado constitutes living a life well and fully.Is it a good legacy?Have I been a positive impact in the lives I’ve touched and will I be remembered even when those people who remember me are themselves no longer in living memory?
As I pointed the car east along Jay Road, it occurred to me why Claire had to go east.Because east is where new days begin.Facing the dawning of a new day, my perspective sort of cracked open and I realized that while I’ve lost a lot, while I’ve lost some things by which I defined myself, the loss of those things has made me aware of the things I retain.I retain a body capable of moving gracefully (sometimes not so gracefully, and the result is always hilarious then) from one yoga pose to the next.I retain a creative force capable of coming up with, at the very least, and if I do say so myself, hilarious Tweets, text messages and chats that make other people laugh.I have friends coming back into my life whose absence I didn’t fully realize I’d felt so keenly and friends who never left.I have family that, in spite of their own difficulties, have sheltered, fed and nurtured me.
So by the time I got home at 4:38 a.m., I had dispelled the specters in the house.I was greeted with the exuberance of two cats who were all excited that their human was up with them for their early, early morning run-around-the-house-all-crazy time.And my own mind had come to some peace with the realization that everything I’ve lost and everything I have has quite possibly, as a card my aunt recently sent me says, set me on my own path; all I have to do is step boldly in the direction of what feels right and meet whatever this new dawning will bring.
There is one thing I like about Colorado: the expanse of sky that you can see. Mile after unobstructed mile of blue scudded with clouds like ships at leisure slowly getting wherever, because the destination isn’t as important as the going. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be a sunny, clear day. Some of my favorite moments in Colorado have been watching storm systems rumble across the great, dark expanse of sky, running rain tendrils across the plains like the grey lace skirts of Victorian girls hesitant about listening in at the keyhole. In Seattle, the sky always felt so close or hemmed in by trees, buildings and hills. But here in Colorado, the sky is vast.
I mention this little tidbit because I’ve been hard pressed to find the positive since moving here in August.
I left a very dull but highly lucrative job in the bustling, thriving core of a city with immediate access by foot, bus or bike to arts, culture, multi-ethnic foods and neighborhoods, yoga classes, universities and some of the most beautiful, green, fern- and tree-rich natural areas within city limits I’ve ever seen. I traded down for a great deal of anxiety over procuring shit temp assignments through a half witted temp agency for miniscule wages the like of which I haven’t earned since 1998 with companies run by middle management like sterile, passive-aggressive nuns harping on kindergarteners about rules of conduct that were outmoded 70 years ago. No water at your desk, indeed! I traded down for living in the farthest flung, Cuesta Verde Estates reaches of suburban Denver out here on the eastern plains with the rabbits, warehouse sized, generically Christian churches with announcement board New Year’s platitudes like “Resolve to let the Lord solve your problems”, strip malls, no Trader Joe’s anywhere at all, in the entire bloody damn state, at least one hour and two forms of public transport away from yoga classes, a decent haircut, bookstores, independent movie theaters, the symphony, the opera, museums and comic book stores. Given this radical change in lifestyle, I spent much of the last four months of 2008 in a black and red wasp-buzzy cloud of depression, anger and resentment. Jim tried to goad me out of it by asking me what was positive about being here. Weren’t the mountains beautiful? Wasn’t it nice to be close to family? Hadn’t we made a nice home in the condo we’re renting from my brother? But I would have none of it and found ways to undermine all of Jim’s positives that he liked about living in Colorado.
Not the most productive way to live. So as the new year turned, after spending time back in Seattle and realizing that my time there is, for now, anyway, over and there’s no way to turn back, I resolved to find the positive about living in Colorado. The sky here is a positive, the expansive, broad blue of it, the expansive, multi-moods of it. That’s something I like about living here.
Joe’s Really Excellent Awesome Emerald City Adventure (In Geek-o-Scope SurroundSound!)(Part Four)
Previously, on Joe’s Really Excellent Awesome Emerald City Adventure:
“I really got my geek on… at the Emerald city Comicon. On Saturday morning, May 10th… Oh my God! So… many… geeks!... I make a bee line over to Julie Benz’s line… Oh yeah… she wants me! She totally wants me… There he is… Wil Wheaton, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher… I shake hands with Wil and tell him that it’s a pleasure meeting him and I thank him for the book and the autograph… I’m on a high for at least the next four hours… The false line reaction is a phenomenon whereby a small group of assembled human beings is assumed by subsequently arriving human beings to constitute a formal line… Wil Wheaton… read from his book The Happiest Days of Our Lives… it was already three in the afternoon and the last time I’d had anything to eat was at eight that morning… I decided I’d best be leaving to head home for dinner.
And now, the conclusion of Joe’s Really Excellent Awesome Emerald City Adventure:
I didn’t sleep very well that night. I was on stimulus overload. Lots of dreams about activity, activity, activity. And something about Whoopi Goldberg riding a lawn mower through the frosting of a giant wedding cake. But I woke up at four the next morning, unable to get back to sleep because my mind was just churning over and over my meetings with Wil Wheaton and Julie Benz and Gigi Edgley and being so excited because I was going to repeat it all again on Sunday! I got up and wrote for an hour and finally went back to bed to snatch some more sleep before I needed to get up to meet Kat for breakfast at 9:30.
Kat and I met at CJ’s in downtown Seattle. It’s good food for reasonable prices and wildly popular, especially on Sunday… the same Sunday that’s also Mother’s Day. But, surprisingly, we get seated right away. I want something lighter, so I order the bagel and lox, which was the exactly perfect thing to get. I filled Kat in on all the yippee moments from the previous day and after breakfast, we headed over to the Convention Center for day two of the Emerald City Comicon.
The atmosphere on Sunday morning is decidedly lower key. As we enter the sales floor area, I notice that the excitement’s somewhat abated. The noise level definitely is. There are fewer people today. Lines are shorter. The long lines that, coupled with his incredible good looks, intimidated me away from Jamie Bamber’s booth yesterday, are completely gone. So after a hem and a haw, I announce to Kat that I am going to go get Jamie Bamber’s autograph.
I buy one of his pictures and then Kat and I are standing before the man himself. Kat tells Jamie that she and he have actually met before, that he gave her an MP3 player. Jamie asks where that was and Kat tells him it was at the screening of Battlestar Galactica: Razor, which was about six months before here in Seattle. There was a drawing at the screening and Jamie Bamber, along with his co-star in the episode, Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, made a surprise appearance to hand out prizes for random drawings, like the Halo 3 decorated Zune that Jamie gave to Kat. I was so excited. He touched Kat’s shoulder. I touched Kat’s shoulder after that. Kat was a little weirded out by my behavior. And then later that evening, when Jamie Bamber was standing outside the theater, talking to fans, I stood around to meet him, but chickened out when I realized “What am I going to say to this hot, hot guy that everyone else isn’t already saying to him? I’ll just look at him from here and… stop staring! Stop staring! I wonder how he defines ‘stalker’.” So I moved off, acquired a tiny Cylon, and felt that I’d missed my chance to talk to a hot hunk.
But now I’m standing right in front of him, as Kat and he are talking, and he’s a little unshaven and he’s speaking in his native English accent and I have a split-second flash fantasy of taking his stubbled chin in my hand and drawing him in to kiss him. But those kinds of naughty sweaty feelings need to be shoved back down because I can’t disrespect him while I’m standing right in front of him by objectifying his hot body! I’m behaving! I’m behaving! He’s talking about being given an Xbox but not having played it very much. He played a golf game on it but got bored because he’d rather be playing golf in real life. He asks us what there is to do in Seattle and I blather something about “You could go see the Space Needle!” Oh, Jesus Christ, no, no! Don’t speak! You only sound like a big dork! And you trigger the re-emergence above your head of the blinking neon sign with the arrow pointing down at you that says “Huge fucking dork!” But I keep talking and say he could also possibly go to the Icon Grill for dinner. He asks why they call in the Icon Grill and I have to admit… I have no idea. He says that he ate heavy the night before, paid $140 for steak dinner for himself and then felt sordid about it later.
Jamie Bamber, unshaven, saying “sordid” with that accent… the sweaty naughty feelings are back!
He signs the picture I chose and we thank him and tell him it’s been a pleasure meeting him. I touched Jamie Bamber. I shook his hand. This hand, this one typing this sentence right now. This hand touched Jamie Bamber. And I haven’t washed it since. I just really don’t have enough Englishmen in my life. I don’t often enough get to hear words finessed with an English accent like “sordid” and “purple”. As Kat and I walk away from Jamie Bamber’s booth, I glance at the picture he signed. “To Joe, Jamie Bamber.” No little heart with dashes on either side.
But yeah, he wants me… he totally wants me.
While we talk about things geeks talk about, Kat and I mosey around the sales floor. I don’t have anything in particular I need to see, but this is Kat’s first day here at the Comicon, so I wander about with her. We roam through booths, around the artists’ tables, past the gaming tables (geeks!), and end up, finally, back in front of Gigi Edgley’s booth. It’s Kat’s turn to meet her.
Kat introduces herself to Gigi, and Gigi also shakes my hand again. This is what I love about Gigi Edgley… she’s very gracious and meets your eyes and smiles and is very enthusiastic about meeting her fans. And once again, Gigi Edgley geeks out about Farscape with a couple of fans. While she signs a still of her as Chiana for Kat, I ask her if she came up with Chiana’s movement in the show, or if that was dictated to her. And Gigi launches into a long explanation about how she did come up with the movements for Chiana. She tells Kat and I that she was on call one day and then they didn’t need her after all, but she had been put into the costume with everything but the makeup. So she went back to her dressing room and stood in front of the mirror and started experimenting with this character staring out at her, and seeing how she moved, and playing with Chiana’s movements. Kat said it was odd that Chiana was the only Nebari in the entire series who moved that way and Gigi Edgley laughed and said, “Well, you know, whenever anyone else came on the show, they said ‘You’re an alien, move however you want. It doesn’t matter, because you’re an alien.’ But yeah, it was weird that Chiana was the only one who moved like that. Not even her brother moved that way.” She finished autographing the picture of herself as Chiana. She signed it “To Kat” with little hearts. She drew a big thought bubble over Chiana’s head and wrote “Waiting to play on Moya. Shine on!” with more little hearts.
Oh yeah, she totally wants Kat.
And Kat had the same reaction to her as I did: she’s so damn cute! You really do just want to hug her and bundle her up in your knapsack and take her home to snuggle with! And I bet Gigi Edgley wouldn’t define that as stalking at all. Not at all. She’d really be game for that, I bet!
Kat and I then do some more moseying around the room until we find ourselves outside Panel Room Morpheus, waiting to go in to Wil Wheaton’s Q&A session, which will be followed by Julie Benz’s Q&A session. While we wait, Kat and I are witnesses to the slow re-development of the false line reaction. True to form, while Kat and I sit near the door, a line forms behind us. Even when we’re asked if this is the line for Wil Wheaton, even though there is no formal line or any formal need for one, we say yes, yes it is, because, baby, we’re first in line this time! A woman sits down next to us, closer to the door than we do, after a good bit of line has formed. Neither Kat nor I say anything to her because, after all, this isn’t really a line. Suddenly the woman who sat next to us realizes that she’s just cut in this line that’s not really a line, and she actually gets up and joins her friends at the back of the line… that’s not really a line. And like that time when Kat and I laughed ourselves silly about Virginia Woolf: Tomb Raider (“Lara Croft said she would buy the bullets herself”), nothing I can say about what we said while we sat in the line that wasn’t a line will ever be as funny in the retelling as it was when we said it, but we laugh about the line. We laugh over the proclamations that you should respect the line (that isn’t a line), you should love the line (that isn’t a line). The line loves you. The line cares for you. The line will offer you a $600 rebate to help invigorate the economy. Vote for the line. Thus, we pass the time. The line grows behind us. Finally, the panel discussion in Panel Room Morpheus is over and we enter and take seats up front, close to where Wil Wheaton will once again be speaking.
Wil appears and takes his post behind the podium and invites people in the audience to step up to the mike to ask questions. I don’t remember most of them. The only reason I remember one of the exchanges is because Wil Wheaton recounted it on his own website. What I do remember about Wil’s Q&A session is how engaging and engaged he is. He is, very much, one of us. I guess, since I’m not as big a geek as he is, as others are, I should say he is, very much, one of them. But I’m enough of a geek to know what he’s talking about most of the time. Wil is articulate, opinionated and funny. I hope I get another opportunity in the future to interact with him, or at the very least, see him read again.
After Wil’s talk, Kat and I stayed in the room until Julie Benz joined us. Her crowd was smaller than Wil’s. And dumber. Because they asked really dumb, fairly par-for-the course questions. But she treated each person with attention and courtesy. Someone asked her what her favorite moment in Angel was and it turns out that her favorite moment is my favorite moment: in the episode “Dear Boy” when Darla burns angel with a cross and tells him “You see, no matter how good a boy you are, God doesn’t want you! But I still do!” LOVE that scene! Julie Benz also talked a lot about her experience working with Sylvester Stallone and filming the latest Rambo movie. It made her, she said, a passionate advocate for human rights in Burma. And as she discussed this movie, she got a little bit into defensive mode. One guy said that the critics pretty much panned the movie, but Julie Benz listed off several critics who liked it. Someone else asked her if she didn’t think the violence in the film was gratuitous, to which she responded that Sylvester Stallone was very smart and knew what he was doing in making the movie. He was, she said, trying to expose the atrocities taking place in Burma and the violence depicted in the film shows the barest fraction of what’s actually going on there. Overall, the atmosphere in Julie Benz’s Q&A felt strained a little. But when I thought about it later, I have to say that I truly admired her for taking her stand and defending her work. Her attitude, I later told Kat, is exactly what I was missing, and why I would never have made it in Hollywood. Because it’s a stance of determination, edged with some ruthlessness.
With that in mind, the day, and the Comicon, ended for Kat and I, and we went back to her place to kill zombies in a mall.
Joe’s Really Excellent Awesome Emerald City Adventure (In Geek-o-Scope SurroundSound!) (Part Three)
Previously, on Joe’s Really Excellent Awesome Emerald City Adventure:
“I really got my geek on… at the Emerald city Comicon. On Saturday morning, May 10th, I walked over to the Washington State Convention Center… Oh my God! So… many… geeks!... I’m totally geeking out about Farscape with THE WOMAN WHO PLAYED CHIANA ON FARSCAPE and she’s geeking out about it JUST AS MUCH AS I AM!!!... I make plans to meet Kat the next day for breakfast and then come back to the Convention Center for more Comicon and so that Kat can meet Chiana, too! And then I hang up my cell phone and head for the bank.
And now, on Joe’s Really Excellent Awesome Emerald City Adventure:
The closest Washington Mutual branch is a couple of blocks west of the Convention Center on Fifth Avenue. As I walk over under cloudy skies, I have a little conversation with myself about how much to withdraw. Given that for the past four years I’ve been saying “I need to buy a new computer” and given that for the past four months I’ve been saying “I’m going to save for a new computer”, going to the bank and withdrawing the amount of money I’m contemplating is a little silly. It’s a frivolous expense, purchasing more books (I have plenty, I really, really do) and celebrities’ autographs. But am I not… a consumer of pop culture? Am I not… a capitalist? Am I not, indeed…an American? [Unfurl the Stars and Stripes here]
I AM A CAPITALIST CONSUMERIST AMERICAN!!! It’s my American right to spend, spend, spend on crap no one needs! So with all due patriotism and the strings of my heart swelling the national anthem, I feed my debit card into the ATM and withdraw $100. The guilt that passes through me will soon be washed clean by the obtaining of celebrity autographs and the commiserating with celebrities themselves. So I go back to the Convention Center as it begins to rain just a little bit.
Back inside, I make a bee line over to Julie Benz’s line. The perky convention helper asks me which of the assortment of pictures I would like Julie to sign. I choose one of her more tasteful headshots, money is handed over, my name is written on a post-it that’s attached to the headshot, and I wait to meet the woman who brought Darla in Buffy and Angel to life. A couple ahead of me asks her some question that elicits her response that she’s just gotten back from Japan. So when I’m standing before her (she really is just so beautiful), I ask her if she’s experiencing any culture shock coming back from Japan (to the U.S., to Seattle, to a geek fest, no less). She says “Not really. I was only there for four days for a press junket. I’m just having a hard time remembering what day it is.” I lean down closer to her and say “It’s Saturday. May 10th.” But only in my head, and only when I think of it about ten minutes later. What I really say is “It’s nice to meet you. Thank you!” And she smiles and I feel that this encounter is somehow just so false. It sort of robs both of us of some humanity. The actor in my mind so identified with a character she played, and the geek, geeking over that character, and not the real woman, not really Julie Benz. As I walk away from her table, I glance down at the headshot she signed with a silver pen. She wrote “To Joe – All the Best!” and she drew a heart flanked by a dash on each side.
Oh yeah… she wants me! She totally wants me.
I feel all warm and glowy inside as I take a position at the end of the line waiting to meet Wil Wheaton. The line is long. The line is moving slowly. I just make sure that I have plenty of time before Wil’s reading at 2:00. There is plenty of time and even time to spare! So I stand in line. I listen in on some of the conversations around me. Nothing memorable. Happy geek babble. I watch the people passing. I check out the cute guys. I notice how many men here have man boobs. And speaking of boobs, I notice as she passes, that Princess Leia has put on some weight! And it ain’t in the buns on the sides of her head. And there’s a Queen Amidala and kaboom! Has she put on the pounds! This is like… this is like the Amidala stand in that they couldn’t use because no one bought that she was Queen Amidala. So they put her on security or linebacker duty. And the line dwindles until finally, I’m next.
There he is… Wil Wheaton, Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Wesley Crusher. The first thing I’m struck by is that Wil’s sporting a beard. Which takes me aback a bit, because I was expecting him to look like he does on his website. That Wil Wheaton’s clean shaven and in a dark, button down shirt. This Wil Wheaton’s bearded and in a Batman t-shirt. This is the geek I’ve heard so much about! And the beard makes him remind me even more of my brother, Mike. Wil Wheaton and Mike really don’t look all that much alike, but there’s something there that’s similar enough to always make me think of Mike in Wil Wheaton’s face. But what am I saying? Now I’m standing in front of Wil Wheaton, daydreaming.
“Hi!” I say to Wil. He smiles gamely and greets me. I tell him I’d like to get one of his books, and I buy a hardback edition of The Best Days of Our Lives. While he signs it (“To Joe. Wil Wheaton” with lots of crazy loopy loops in his signature), I tell him that I’m a big fan of his blog. “Your blog has helped me pass many a boring hour at work.”
“Excellent!” he smiles up at me. “I’m glad to hear that!”
“Yeah,” I say, “Whenever I can’t take the boredom any more, I just sign on to see what Wil Wheaton’s been up to!”
Thank God, he’s laughing at that. Not at that… with that!
“I’m discovering a lot of new music through your blog, too,” I continue. “Like Jonathan Coulton’s stuff.”
Wil’s eyes light up and he smiles a big smile. “His stuff is excellent! His Thing A Week collections are awesome.”
“Yeah, I listened to a lot of those. My favorite is the zombie song.”
“I LOVE the zombie song!”
And I tell Wil, as I’ve told you, dear reader, that I was so excited to see that I could download part of the zombie song as a ringtone for my cell phone. Wil laughs and says that’s awesome while a giant neon sign that says “Huge fucking dork!” with an arrow pointing down appears above my head and starts blinking. I shake hands with Wil and tell him that it’s a pleasure meeting him and I thank him for the book and the autograph. As I move away from his table, the ATM withdrawal-induced guilt is, as predicted, washed clean in the glow of celebrity interaction and autograph acquisition. I’m on a high for at least the next four hours.
With no further celebrities that I care about around to buy and glow from, I wander around the floor and peruse booths. The Dark Horse booth, publisher of the Season Eight Buffy comics. They give me lots of free shit. The gay comics booth. They give me no free stuff. I more carefully peruse some of the booths with toys and action figures and collector’s action figures. I am bemused by the booth of Imperial Stormtroopers. I had no idea that there was an actual organization of Imperial Stormtroopers in the world, the 501st Legion. That is crazy wacky! I bide my time for a bit and then decide I’d best go sit over by the room that Wil Wheaton will be reading in.
I leave the sales floor for the more sterile and quieter area outside Panel Rooms A and B. I think they could have gotten a little more creative with the panel room names. “A” and “B”… come on! Are we not comics geeks? How about Panel Room Superman and Panel Room Batman? Or Panel Room Zippy and Panel Room Ghost World? Or something like that? Even so… I go to the door to Panel Room B, which has been re-designated as Panel Room A (so, someone was getting creative in some capacity, switching signs around like that). I’m twenty minutes early and the room is currently in use by the panel discussion before Wil’s reading, so I sit in the wide, empty, high ceilinged hallway with my back against the wall to wait. About 12 feet away are two women standing next to the sign listing scheduled events for Panel Room A (or Panel Room Morpheus). I pull out my copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five to pass the time and as I read, a woman sits down between me and the women next to the door, thereby setting in motion the false line reaction.
The false line reaction is a phenomenon whereby a small group of assembled human beings is assumed by subsequently arriving human being to constitute a formal line. And so I watch, over the next twenty minutes, as people line up behind me, and the line grows and bends and twists upon itself, when really, there’s no need for a line and there’s no actual line, because the three women and I didn’t consciously line up. At one point, the woman who sat down between me and the two women standing at the door leaned over and said to me “I’m sorry. Did I cut in line ahead of you?” For a split second I consider needling guilt into her heart by saying “Yes. But that’s okay. Whatever.” But instead I confide in her “No. I wasn’t actually in a line.” Although over the course of the few minutes I watched the line form, I did tell people, when asked “Is the line for Wil Wheaton?”, that yes, yes it was the line for Wil Wheaton that I’m fourth in line of, so… back to the end of the line, late coming loser!
Finally, in a tumult of geeks, the panel in session ends and lets out. And I, fourth in place, have prime seating choices and I sit up close to the front of the room. From the tangle of people conversing from the previous panel, being herded out by the crack Comicon staff, emerges Wil Wheaton. He takes up his position behind the podium and is greeted by enthusiastic applause and hooting and hollering. He read from his book The Happiest Days of Our Lives, the very book he just signed for me! He read his story about being propelled back in time, watching kids playing with Star Wars action figures, to when he was a kid, buying Star Wars action figures. As much as Wil Wheaton was propelled back in time, his reading propels me back in time to the day my dad walked my brother Rick and I to the toy aisles of Gibson’s in Longmont. We left the store with one of every one of the action figures that Gibson’s had in stock that day. Wil also read a story about Star Trek conventions and then, nearing the end of his time in Panel Room Morpheus, he began and was, unfortunately, unable to finish his reading of my favorite of his stories: how he met William Shatner. It’s an awesome story, and to recount it here would not do it justice, but you can find part one of the story here, and part two here. Plus, I think it’s even more awesome read in Wil’s own voice. But we ran out of time, and were dispersed to make way for the next panel discussion in that room.
I left, considering popping into Panel Room B (or Panel Room Cthulu) for Jamie Bamber’s Q&A. But it was already three in the afternoon and the last time I’d had anything to eat was at eight that morning. I was starving! And when I’m that hungry, I am mostly incapable of enjoying much of anything. So I decided I’d best be leaving to head home for dinner. As I trudged up 8th Avenue, across the bridge to Seneca, I regretted that I would miss Jamie Bamber, but the next day the regret would be tempered by actually meeting and talking to him.
