Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Because of a glitch in my increasingly complicated AV system, I was unable to watch or Tivo tonight’s remake on NBC of Stephen King’s Carrie. This would fill me with despair and bitterness except for the fact that my friend D.R. has Tivoed it for me.

I fantasize pretty much every day about having supernatural powers. Before I moved to New York, it was pretty much always telekinesis, though back then I wasn’t full enough of rage to add in the pyrokinetic destruction of my enemies. Or, rather, I was full enough of rage, but I had no easy access to it because I had repressed it all. Now I split my fantasy time pretty evenly between the pyrokinetic destruction of my enemies and teleportation, which would mean I would never have to take the subway again.

I hope to see the remake of Carrie very soon. In the meantime, though, I found a not particularly favorable but hysterically funny review of it in The Toronto Star by a man named Rob Salem. Apparently, at the end of the remake, instead of dying, Carrie lives and drives off with Sue Snell. This is what Mr. Salem has to say:

“This isn’t just a lame TV-movie remake. This is in fact a lame ‘back-door pilot.’ Stay tuned, I’m very afraid, for Carrie: The Series. Now, I’ve actually given this some thought, and I’ve come up with several plot suggestions for the series’ first season. Consider them a gift. Or a warning.

“Episode #1: ‘Dressed For Success’—Carrie and Sue pull into a mid-western town where they both get jobs at The Gap. Tempers flare when Carrie is accused of hoarding sale items for herself. Sue then discovers the clothes in question stashed in an empty change room, but it is already too late, because Carrie has already killed everyone in the store and set the mall on fire.

“Episode #2: ‘Do You Want Fries With That?’—The girls are working the late shift at an all-night diner when a couple of small-time hoods try to hold the place up. Carrie telekinetically suspends one of them upside down in mid-air, dunking him head-first into a tub of boiling fat. The other escapes, running right into the arms of the awaiting cops, who arrive just in time to see an enraged Carrie kill everyone in the place and then set it on fire.

“Episode #3: ‘Homeless Is Where The Heart Is’—A very special episode of Carrie: The Series, with Sue signing both of them up as volunteers to serve Christmas dinner at a shelter. Everything goes fine until Carrie accidentally undercooks the turkey. The starving homeless people turn on them, advancing slowly, forks and knives in hand. Carrie has no choice but to kill them all and burn the shelter to the ground.

“Episode #4: ‘The Sincerest Form Of Flattery’—Carrie and Sue narrowly escape a police roadblock just outside Florida, and end up laying low in a motel. The police eventually track them down by following the trail of blackened, smoking corpses. Surrounding the motel, they call in two experts, a has-been film director (a cameo by Brian De Palma) and a recently retired horror novelist (Stephen King), who try to talk the girls into surrendering themselves. Carrie is clearly moved by their entreaties. And then she kills them both and sets the motel on fire.”

I would become addicted to this series in a heartbeat.

Tonight, I was scheduled to sing in a concert of the songs of my friend Y.E. When I showed up for the sound check and took my glasses off in preparation for putting my contacts in, I realized that I had brought two right-eye lenses. My left eye takes a much stronger prescription than my right eye, so I spent the entire concert in a bizarre state of half-blurry half-clear vision. Luckily I knew all the music very well, so reading it wasn’t an issue.

But it made me think: when I meet a new person I want to fall in love with, maybe I should wear two right-eye lenses. That way I’ll be able to see clearly enough to interact like a normal human being, but he will appear blurry enough to seem handsome, whether he is or not. Then I can get to know him as a person instead of deciding instantaneously that he’s not physically attractive enough.

On second thought, however, this would require that I get to know him as a person, which is, if experience is any guide, a big mistake.

Today I had another undate. Really, this is getting to be ridiculous.

I answered the planet out ad of a guy who seemed to possess both a sense of humor and a social conscience, as well as the ability to spell and a cute photo. He wrote back and said he liked my ad, too, but added, “in the interest of full disclosure, though, I’m also more of a catcher.” (For those of you unfamiliar with gayspeak, this means he too is a bottom.) But he suggested that we could always get together for a friendly cup of coffee.

So I said, sure, why not, and we arranged to meet.

Please don’t ask me why I felt like I was going on a date even though we’d expressly said it wasn’t a date. Maybe it was that “more of a catcher” left at least some room for him to be a pitcher, or maybe the capacity of the human mind for denial—or at least the capacity of my human mind for denial—is even greater than I realized. In any event, I arrived for our meeting dressed in something form-fitting, and far more nervous than a friendly cup of coffee warranted.

So he showed up and had terrible teeth.

It seems to me that, if one has a job that comes with health and dental insurance (which he did), then having terrible teeth is a clear sign of misplaced priorities.

Plus he knew far too much about the differences between the Star Wars special edition and the original version.

Again, the fact that there is NO WAY HE AND I COULD BE A COUPLE because we are SEXUALLY INCOMPATIBLE should have made me not care in the slightest.

But instead, I spent all afternoon resenting him and his teeth.

Don’t ask me to explain myself, because I can’t.

Thanks to everybody for the emergency hair advice. I ended up going to the 24-hour Duane Reade at 5:00 a.m., getting another bleach kit, and doing it again.

Now my hair is a gorgeous shade of blond never seen before on this planet. It is also so fried from the bleach that if anybody touches it it will crumble to dust.

It’s okay, since it’s falling out anyway.

In a disastrous attempt to complete my Hallowe’en costume (I intended to go as Buffy), I dyed my hair blond.

It is now bright orange.

Would that it were possible to decapitate oneself.

I have a new crush. He is so cute I can hardly stand it.

The problem is that I can’t blog about him effectively, because there’s a small chance he might read my blog. I gave him the URL a few weeks ago and, though he has given me no indication that he’s actually read it, he could be either a) reading it and not telling me about it or b) waiting to read it until he gets a chance to enjoy it, so I can’t write anything that will uniquely identify him, or he might read it and know it’s him, or this other person who happens to work with him in a professional capacity might read it and know it’s him, though I don’t know if that person is reading it either, but if he is then that would be an unacceptable invasion of my crush’s privacy, and furthermore since I have no way to know whether my crush is actually reading it or not (because of course I can’t do something as sensible as asking him), I would be constantly tortured by uncertainty about whether he’d read what I wrote about him or not and realized what a NEUROTIC FREAK I am.

Don’t you wish you were me? Then you could be this healthy all the time.

He is so cute I can hardly stand it.

This morning I woke up to find a chewed up piece of gum stuck in my ass hair.

Last night I had a lovely date, but no stretch of the imagination allows me to understand how this could have happened, since neither one of us took any clothes off. And, for that matter, neither one of us chewed any gum.

My ass does not chew gum, either.

Forgive me for the grossness of this post, but I am afraid of what the universe might be trying to tell me.

After I broke up with N.T.—or, more properly, after N.T. broke up with me, that fucker, not that I’m bitter—I had a stunningly obvious realization.

Every book we’ve ever read and every movie we’ve ever seen has told us that love is something you feel for someone who is the perfect best friend, the perfect roommate, the perfect lover, the perfect intellectual companion, and the perfect conversationalist.

Clearly only a raving lunatic would expect to find all these in one person. So, just as clearly, this can’t be what love is.

That was my realization about love. My question now is: so what the hell is it?

In an effort to bring clarity into my life, I renamed the hard drive of my computer. It used to be called Beelzebub, after the Father of Lies.

Now it is called Elizabeth Bennett, after the heroine of Pride and Prejudice.

Unfortunately, things are as murky as ever.

When I was six or seven, I joined the Cub Scout den run by the Jewish Community Center. I remember very little about my tenure as a Cub Scout—which, as I recall, lasted about two weeks—except that at one point we put on a play about the plight of Soviet Jewry. The play consisted of three pairs of vignettes: an American praying in synagogue, and a Russian praying in synagogue and getting carted off by the secret police; an American printing a Jewish newspaper, and a Russian printing a Jewish newspaper and getting carted off by the secret police; and an American teaching Hebrew, and a Russian teaching Hebrew and getting carted off by the secret police.

In every pair of vignettes, I played the Russian who got carted off by the secret police.

My college friend N.K. told me that he was a member of a progressive Boy Scout troop that performed a musical written by the Scouts’ parents. N.K. played the part of a Capitalist and sang a song called “When I Need a Friend, I Buy One.”

When N.K. first told me this I was wildly jealous, but then I realized that I had clearly gotten the better deal, since I was the one who was manhandled—not once but three times—by men in uniform.