Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Once, when I was little, my father was going grocery shopping and asked my brother Y. and me what kind of peanut butter we wanted. My brother said he liked Jif best but also enjoyed Peter Pan. I hated Jif and loved Peter Pan, so I said as much and asked him to get Peter Pan.

Upon his return from the grocery store, my father said, “Faustus, since Y. was willing to be flexible and compromise and you weren’t, I got Jif.”

When I protested that this wasn’t fair, he said what he always said whenever either one of us thought something wasn’t fair:

“Well, it’s like Jimmy Carter always used to say. Sometimes life just isn’t fair.”

Life has grown much fairer to Jimmy Carter than it was–what with the Nobel Peace Prize and all–and my father, perhaps in subconscious sympathy, has grown much fairer to me. But there’s a small part of me that has never been able to let this go.

Now I eat Skippy.

I have spent the entire day alternating between despair and shock.

Despair because the actor who was my houseguest for a week and whose mere physical presence rendered me almost incapable of spelling flew back to Los Angeles this morning, where he lives.

Shock because someone has actually responded to my Drip personal ad. (For the story behind the ad, click here; for the text of the ad itself, hieroglyphs and all, click here.) I had pretty much resigned myself to the idea that, for whatever reason, my attempts to write a witty, charming, and insouciant ad had produced a document that caused gay men to flee me as they might flee a pair of plaid golf pants or Anita Bryant. And yet someone had read my ad and found it intriguing enough to respond to.

So I went down to Drip and looked at his ad, which was totally charming and funny. His grammar was impeccable, as was his spelling (though he did write “theatre” instead of “theater,” but I’m not prepared to write him off yet, since that is his only evident flaw, at least so far). The first word in his self-description section was “zany” and among his biggest turn-offs was “braying pretention.” Plus he listed Marshmallow Peeps among his interests.

At the moment, however, Mr. Zany is an unknown quantity and the actor is thousands of miles away.

Thank God I have a dog or I would be so fucking lonely I would die.

For those of us who are single and bitter on this Valentine’s Day, I have compiled a very short list of activities:

1. Make a submission to the Valentine’s Day haiku project [link no longer active] (run by east/west [link no longer active]), in which one writes haiku to (or at) one’s ex (or exes). Here are my two entries:

Saint Valentine was
beaten with clubs, head chopped off:
Fucker deserved it.

Remember when I
said I disliked oral sex?
I meant just with you.

2. Buy and read How to Heal the Hurt by Hating by Anita Liberty. Here is an excerpt.

Feel free to add to the list.

I just sat down to write a long and funny post about how the first time I ever came out to anybody (at age fifteen) I was so nervous that I couldn’t do it in English, so I did it in French instead, but as I was starting to craft the post, my houseguest, the actor I made out with the other day (and have actually been making out with daily since), returned, and since my huge crush on him has intensified tenfold since last night, when I tried to push things further and he said no, sex is something really important that ought to be shared between two people who have decided to share something really important, his return to my apartment has rendered me completely incapable of concentrating enough to construct a sentence (as this post makes clear), much less an amusing story.

And now I’ve given away the punchline of the coming-out-in-French story, so there’s no point in saving it for later either.

Okay, he’s sitting on my couch reading and now I can barely spell.

Excuse me while I go gaze longingly.

Not too long ago an oxygen tank exploded in the apartment building across the street from me, killing an old lady and starting a fire that gutted the fifth floor. It got me thinking about fire, which in turn led me to write the following lyric.

Sitting by the fire
That’s supposed to warm my chill,
I wonder if it ever
Will.

Hmm.

I wonder if it’s time to go back on Prozac.

I have gained nine pounds since Thursday.

I feel that Job’s wife had the right idea when she told him to curse God and die.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the day I started this blog (with this post). My bloggiversary, as it were. (Bloggaversary? Blogiversary?)

In preparation for this momentous occasion, I registered my own domain name. I’d hoped to have the web site up and running in time to unveil it today, but, as we all know, the best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.

Nevertheless, I feel very grown up and proud.

Let’s see if I can make it to two.

Those of you who live in New York City should make every effort to attend the following show:

Reasons you should attend:

1. He is a brilliant songwriter.
2. The centerpiece of the show is a shriekingly funny mini-musical about the disintegration of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend, called Poodle Rescue.
3. I will be in attendance at every performance, so you’ll get the chance to see me, even if you don’t know it’s me.

In other news, last night I made out with an extraordinarily cute movie and TV actor. He lives in Los Angeles, so there is no real soul-mate potential here. But this is the first time I’ve ever made out with a movie star, unless you count the time I had sex with the guy who appeared in his own documentary about Jesse Helms, which I don’t.

And besides, the guy from last night is much cuter.

Well, though he wasn’t a septuagenarian, he had left college before I learned how to tie my shoes. Alas.

And yes, I did learn how to tie my shoes late. But not that late.

Back to the drawing board.

Tonight I have my first date with one of my Hurry Date matches. (The end result of the Hurry Date was fairly anticlimactic: out of perhaps ten or fifteen people I circled “Y” for, three also circled “Y” for me. These did not include, alas, the publicist for All My Children.

Surprisingly enough, they did include the guy to whom I made a confession of murder; I’m seeing him tonight. I suspected in the dim bar lighting that he might be a septuagenarian, but I wasn’t sure so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. One of the two others responded to my post-match e-mail but not to any subsequent e-mails, and the other didn’t even respond to my post-match e-mail, which was okay because I had absolutely no recollection of him anyway.

Not the most fruitful endeavor I’ve ever undertaken.

Maybe I should confess to murder more often.