Monthly Archives: June 2004

One of the advantages of having a boyfriend who’s about to start his residency in psychiatry is that I get to learn all sorts of terrific things about how society deals with crazy people.

For instance: the Secret Service keeps a list of crazy people who have threatened to kill the President of the United States. Then, whenever the President of the United States comes to town, the Secret Service sends a pair of agents to spend the day with each crazy person. They go to lunch, they go to the movies, maybe do a little shopping. Apparently the crazy people love this. “Oh, wow!” they say. “Stan and Joey are coming to town to take me out!”

Now that’s a deal I’d love to be in on. Especially if Stan and Joey were hot.

The problem, of course, is that threatening to kill the President of the United States is a federal crime, and I’d have to be able to convince the authorities that I was crazy rather than criminal.

I’m going to truncate this post here, because the more I write, the more I fear a knock at my door followed by the entrance of anonymous men from the Department of Homeland “Security” and my inexplicable but permanent disappearance.

N.B.: This post was inspired by this man’s reflection on his name.

When I was five–I believe this was before the picket described in the “about me” section on the right-hand side of this page, but I can’t be sure–I decided that my first name wasn’t nearly glamorous enough, and I needed to change it.

Even at such a tender age, I was aware that “Daisy” (after my favorite character on The Dukes of Hazzard) wasn’t a realistic option. But, after a day or two of careful consideration, I was able to narrow the list down to two choices, both of which seemed eminently suitable to me.

I then spent three days trying to figure out whether I should change my name to “Rainbow” or “Jehovah.”

It was agonizing. “Rainbow” was certainly colorful and bright and joyous–all qualities I felt I possessed in spades–but it lacked the grandeur of “Jehovah.” At the same time, “Jehovah,” while it satisfied my secret feelings of omnipotence and superiority, might distance people from me in ways that “Rainbow” wouldn’t. I briefly considered changing both my first and last names and becoming “Rainbow Jehovah,” but somehow that seemed to be crossing a line.

In the end, unable to decide, I gave up and stuck with the name my parents had chosen.

I guess I could always use “Rainbow Jehovah” as a drag name, but, to be honest, I do really bad drag. So perhaps it’s best to leave well enough alone.

I always thought that the news of Ronald Reagan’s death, when it finally came, would fill me with a joy and elation thitherto unmatched in my life.

And I’m certainly happy that such a force for evil has departed this world. But I’m not dancing around my apartment in the total ecstasy I expected.

My muted response baffled me until I realized it was because the conglomerate of evil we have running the country now is even worse.

In therapy yesterday, I was talking about various worries and anxieties we’d discussed a couple weeks ago, and how I was feeling better about some of them, or at least somewhat less tortured. My therapist said, “It sounds like you’re working through these issues very well.”

I said, “It’s not so much that I’m working through them. It’s more that I’m on a path, and whatever’s on the path is there, and I’ll just keep walking it.”

“You sound dangerously close to enlightenment,” he said.

“Have no fear,” I answered.

I feel no small degree of shame about what I am about to confess.

I have jumped on the bloggers-writing-books bandwagon.

I have written a book.

And Random House is publishing it.

Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while may remember that I participated in the Blogathon by writing 49 haiku about gay dating and sex.

Well, people seemed to like them, and they were easy enough to write, so I decided to write 20 more and try and get the group published as 69 Gay Haiku.

Eventually somebody at Random House decided he wanted to publish it. The only issue was that he wanted 110 haiku. I had no problem writing the extra haiku; it’s just that 69 Gay Haiku is the only decent title I’ve ever come up with for anything. The current title of the book is Gay Haiku.

I would link to the haiku that I posted for the Blogathon, but I was contractually obligated to take them off the web site.

So, as I say, I feel no small sense of shame about this. However, the first part of my advance came yesterday, and, let me tell you, there’s nothing that takes that shame away like being able to pay the collection agencies what you owe them.

Since Six Flags is in far-off New Jersey, we actually left New York the day before our afternoon there and spent the night at E.S.’s parents’ house, which is about half an hour away from the park. After dinner, E.S.’s parents were talking about how aging affects memory. We had the following exchange:

E.S.’s father: “As you get older, the facts start to drop away but the wisdom you’ve learned from them stays with you.”
Me: “What if you never had any wisdom, only facts?”
E.S.’s mother: “Then you’re doomed.”