The Reader Travels

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 Pretenders in their private cul de sac. 

I love working in cube city in corporate Dallas. I’m a kick-ass project manager, climbing the ladder, trying not to kiss anybody’s ass while keeping my CLTs in check. And despite its abuse in corporate USA, I’ve loved the word “synergy,” ever since the first time I heard it from a high school substitute teacher who was a recovering drug and alcohol addict trying to keep us kids off drugs, but that’s another story altogether.

But even though I love folk music and I don’t wear make-up, even though I fancy myself a writer, and even though I’ve been collecting drums and percussion instruments for over ten years, I had never been to a drum circle before yesterday. Yes, that’s right, I was a drum circle virgin until August 2, 2008.

I know going to one drum circle doesn’t make me an expert or anything, but I thought it was a pretty good circle, high energy, very well attended, belly dancing, children, chanting, the works.  That’s right folks, the hippies are alive and well in Texas suburbia.

And you thought we all lived on ranches and wore cowboy boots.

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 was (and still is) a guitar god. And despite people wanting to classify Extreme as a worthless hair band, he’ll argue that Pornograffiti was one of the greatest guitar albums of all time.

Now, if we were comparing our relationship back in those days, he would’ve been Gary, and I’d have been Nuno, even though he played guitar and I sang.  My man always was a jokester, a cute little clown who turned cartwheels and told tall tales.  And I was long and slender, catlike in my sensuality, with music pouring out of me.

We were falling in love, though neither one of us wanted to jinx things by actually talking about it.  But when he discovered the song “Tragic Comic,”  it just seemed to sum us up perfectly. Breaking the ice of the friendship zone, he gave me the lyrics and played the song for me.

I’m a hapless romantic
St-t-tuttering p-poet
Just call me a tragic comic
Cause I’m, in, in love with you

Of course, it all ended as a proper comedy should. He turned out to be not so tragic after all.

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 read, but I wouldn’t really belong in Academe.

I’ve read Plato’s Republic, and I wouldn’t fit into his ideal world where people do one thing only, so they can do that one thing exquisitely. It just doesn’t work for me. I think that things I learn in one subject can help me to understand another, and everything crosses over, filling in pieces of a larger puzzle.

I thought Irving Stone’s characterization of Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy was pretty close to the Platonic ideal of a man so focused on his craft that his creations were of the highest quality imaginable. He didn’t even want to have a mate, simply because it would distract him from his work.  But even Michelangelo dabbled in painting and architecture, art forms that only helped him to perfect his talent as a sculptor.

Sure I like to be good at what I do. I just think life would be too boring if I only did one thing all the time. And speaking of the Republic, I keep passing by this place that looks like it could be a restaurant but more likely some sort of exclusive club where you have to be invited by someone in the inner circle. The sign says “Republic” and nothing more. 

I had to know, so I searched the Web for “Republic Las Colinas” because it wasn’t even listed on Guidelive, which is supposed to know everything about restaurants in the DFW area, except there’s a bunch of restaurants still listed in Irving and Las Colinas even though they’ve been out of business for two years or more, but I digress.

So their Web site pretty much confirmed it. The way the signs made it look like an exclusive club was intentional, good marketing I guess. The description on the Web site starts off, “Located in trendy Las Colinas…” Ew.

I’ll go anyway.  I don’t care if they stare when they see my disheveled hair. I’m following the thread, following my nose, searching for new flavors and a new adventure.

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 more work, and by gosh it’s springtime, so I have to be outside, buzzing with friends and family, which means cleaning my house so when people can come over I create the illusion of keeping a clean house. Somebody had the great idea of having a crawfish boil, at my house, and as fate would have it, we found someone who’d come by and bring his pot and a bag of bugs and do it all for us, and with my schedule these days, you know I was jumping all over that. Whew!

What I do have time for is half-hour sitcoms on DVD.  They not only keep me laughing, but they keep me on location in London.  I’m not sure that US network television would ever be ready for Coupling, but it’s exactly what I need.

Embracing the voyage across the sea, I brought my copy of Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a novel about young Will Shakespeare, a glove maker’s son, bored with his party buddies in Stratford and moving on to much more exciting things. I was glad I’d read it before, because my vacation was too much of a distraction to actually focus on any of the words I was reading.

Really, it’s a beautiful work, very sexy, poetic and lyrical, but I had to keep rereading paragraphs, pondering the most minute phrases.  Like, what body part was he talking about when he referred to her “black flue”?  I think I know. I’m pretty sure he was talking about giving it to her up the old chimney if you know what I mean.

Anyhow, the first opportunity I had to read was on our flight across the ocean.  But how could I read a poetic novel when a hot young Israeli chick was flirting with me the whole time in her sexy broken English?  Burgess’s words just couldn’t compete with my trying to explain to her what the word “goo” means. 

Do I have something in my eye, she asked, leaning into me. I gently scraped her eye with the tip of my finger.  No hair, just a little goo, I told her.  I don’t know what you’re saying, she smiled and fluttered her eyelashes at me.  You know, like snot or boogers, and I made a gesture like I was picking my nose.  Sexy, right?

When our meals came, my plate held a pile of gelatinous mashed potatoes, and I didn’t think about it until later that this was the perfect way to communicate the meaning of the word “goo.” 

As I tried to sleep, I knew I could make out with her if I wanted to, start my vacation on an exciting note.  But it was enough for me to think, as I take this trip to celebrate my 40th birthday, hey, maybe I’ve still got it.

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 she’d never been to a funeral with an open casket because they always did cremation back home.  This led us to the book I’m reading now, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, in which I have just read a scene that takes place at a crematorium.  It seems China and England have similar customs where they go and watch the loved ones enter the flames, while in the USA, we don’t really do that.  We send the body away, and it comes back as ashes in a box or a jar, all mysterious-like, where you wonder if they didn’t just empty a bunch of ash trays into a box and pass it off as your cousin Larry.

M threatened her mother with a bright pink coffin since she’s always hated the color.  Then D admitted that since she liked all things pink, she might like to have a Hello Kitty coffin as her final resting place.  And if the food hadn’t come, I might have talked about the touring exhibit of African coffins I saw many years ago at the Dallas Museum of Art, where they’d make a wooden sculpture that represented the dead man’s life and bury him in it.  An airplane for a pilot, a huge carrot for a farmer, you get the picture.  I’m just not sure why these things weren’t buried, unless they were still awaiting their owners’ demise.

See, this is a conversation I can appreciate.  One day, I’d like to visit the funeral service museum in the north side of Houston, which I read about in some Texas magazine the year after I saw the coffins on tour.  It seems they had the pleasure of hosting the same exhibit.  Call it a morbid fascination, call it research.

Anyway, as I lay down to bed last night, I opened my book and saw this phrase on the page — “the big D.”  Of course, Hornby’s not talking about Dallas, Texas. After all, he’s in London.  What he is talking about, is Death.

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 coming out of the closet.

We’re going to stretch this out a little bit, so bear with me.  Once again, I find myself thinking of the cave as a metaphor for women, and how some men might feel they’re trapped in the hole of womankind. So for Plato to come out of the cave and see the light and find himself in the company of men with superior and enlightened minds, he’s freeing himself of the dull company of women.

As some gay men are, Plato was also a bit of a feminist, though.  In his perfect society, his Republic, the women and men would all exercise naked together, side by side as equals.  Even though women had such revolting bodies, he recommended that men just bite the bullet for the good of the society and do their jumping jacks right next to a cavernous cow with a pair of flopping udders.

How’s that for mixed metaphor?

So another of my favorite tales from philosophaster school was the allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic.  Similar to the fat guy story, and as its name suggests, this one also happens in a cave. 

It goes something like this: you’ve spent your life chained to a cave wall.  People pass by outside the cave, and they talk and carry on, but from your vantage point, you can’t actually see them.  You can, however, see the shadows they cast on the cave wall, and all your life, you think the shadows are doing the talking and causing all the commotion. And that’s fine for you.

Except one day, you’re set free, and you see that there are actual three-dimensional people making all that racket.  Maybe you go insane with this new information, or maybe you were ready to see the truth, and you can then become a productive member of the shadow-casting crowd.

It’s an allegory for the lies told to us by our leaders.  They keep us in the dark watching shadows because it’s all we can understand. 

“It’s a free country,” they say.  But baby, freedom’s just a shadow on the wall.

That’s okay, though. It’s a beautiful illusion.

So, the man decided to move on, and I had to come along for the ride.  While the blog application he wrote was fine in the beginning, he wanted to get all fancy with the link backs and the tags and the spam controls, so he figured WordPress was a better way to go.

While it was easy for us to port over all the past articles, it wasn’t so easy to bring our comments along.  Sorry about that. We had our best discussion in months on The Gay Old Days, and I’ll try to add those back if I can since they really added a layer of comedy that I never could have achieved on my own.

Anyway, I’ve been obsessing all day, tweaking the design and other settings, and now you have it.  A whole new me.

I’m loving the search functionality.  You should try it out.  Here are some of my favorite searches so far:

chichimeca
junialeeg
drag queen
blinking

This phrase sums up everything I learned from my college ethics classes: blow up the fat guy! We often discussed the question of whether there was any ethical difference between actively killing someone or passively letting someone die.

This was my favorite scenario. You have a bunch of people trapped in a cave. There’s a small opening and people have been getting out through the hole until this fat guy gets stuck, so now the people inside the cave are really trapped. The water is rising in the cave, and if we don’t do something fast, everyone is going to drown, except the fat guy who’s head is out in the air.

There’s some dynamite, and we could take the chance to blow a hole in the cave wall, but if you do that, the fat guy gets blown to smithereens.

So the question is, what do you do? Do you let all these people die because you don’t want to commit murder? Or do you say, to hell with my mortal soul, I’m saving these people?

The answer is simple to me. I mean, what was the fat guy thinking anyway? He knew he wouldn’t fit through that hole, so the least he could have done was let all those tiny little women and children go through first.

These are the hard decisions that leaders must make. You must be prepared to pay the price. You must be prepared to blow up the fat guy.