So, Halloween is coming up, and there are decisions to be made. My costume tradition is to pay tribute to someone famous who’s died in the last year, and I have a few interesting options this year. There’s:

» Jeff Healey, blind guitar player extraordinaire
» Bobby Fischer who kicked ass at chess and then became a freaky recluse
» […]

I don’t know why I find the subject of syphilis to be so fascinating. Maybe because you have these great minds through history that turn to madness with the aid of a tiny bacterium. Maybe because I’m also fascinated with Hansen’s Disease which has a similar but more nefarious stigma. 
People are always speculating about famous […]

When I was a pensive seventeen year old, I stared at the beautiful antique dresser inherited from my grandmother and interpreted the art of it. Through my powers of observation, I saw in the dresser a scene of the afterlife.  The top part is carved to represent heaven, and the bottom is hell. Hell is represented […]

I’m only one season behind on Lost now.  When I started watching, I was three years behind, watching scenes that happened before, feeling as if I had slipped back in time to the year 2004, watching time progress again to 2005 and 2006.  So, I’m a little slow in jumping on a bandwagon, and I’d […]

I have friends who belong to the gay religious right, family who epitomize the religious left, parents who sit around singing 60s peacenik songs while spouting unadulterated Republican rhetoric, a sister who cried and didn’t talk to our parents for weeks after W got reelected. Me, I’m a corporate ho with hippy tendencies, hanging with The […]

Shakespeare’s formula goes something like this — tragedies end in death, and comedies end with a wedding. So a tragic comic is a bit of an oxymoron.  Back in the days when my man and I were “just friends,” he was a big fan of the band Extreme. Gary Cherone was always a goober, but Nuno Bettencourt […]

I wouldn’t ever pretend to be a Shakespearean scholar or a philosopher. I’m a dabbler, a generalist. I think lots of things are interesting, so I follow threads on whims. I don’t need to know everything there is to know about a subject. I don’t want to be an expert on anything. I love to […]

One of my favorite lines from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was, “So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”  It’s poetry really, because when you’ve overfilled your time, you get all discombobulated like that.
I have no time for books or movies these days, just work and […]

Out at dinner with my girlfriends last night, we spent an unusually large amount of time talking about death and funeral customs, burials, cremation, mourning, insurance policies.  It started with M, talking about her recent trip to Houston for her grandmother’s funeral. 
The phrase, “There wasn’t an open casket,” led us in.  J, who’s from China, said […]

Travels are cyclical — you start at home, you go away and then you come back home again.  And now I’ve come full circle from the philosophical discussion and back to the gay.  We are talking about Plato, after all.  I was thinking that maybe coming out of the cave for Plato was a little like […]