Author Archives: Joel Derfner

I never linked to this blog from my own because Faustus’s entries tend to be a tad bit more, shall we say, risqué than mine, and my mother reads my blog. I know, I know . . . what kind of nutjob starts a journal of his activities and lets his mother read it? This is the sort of thing I will have to bring up in therapy, but for now, suffice it to say that I do not want have to explain to my mother why, among other things, my very dear friend got in trouble with his not-boyfriend for having someone else’s bite marks on his ass.

So it occurs to me that I can use some of my time in this space to talk about things that I would not like my mother to know.

Today, for example, as I went into the locker room after working out at the gym, a man in there gave me a funny look. He, himself, was almost dressed, and I still had to strip out of my workout clothes, go into the steam room for a few minutes, and then take a shower (the first step of which he watched with avid eyes). When I returned to my locker ten minutes later, he was still there. I have no idea how he contrived to delay his progress for that long, but I pretended not to see him or the notice he was paying me. When I was ready, I grabbed my things and breezed out of the room, up the stairs, and into the lobby with him on my heels. Only when I greeted my waiting female friend with a great hug did he veer off . . . although not without one last, lingering look.

I will not pretend that all of this did not thrill me to no end. I have a boyfriend, and the gentleman in question was so not my type, but my shaky confidence in my physical appearance was certainly augmented a notch or two by having someone select me out of a room full of handsome gym gods and go through such obvious lengths in pursuit.

I think I will keep going to that gym because I am obviously doing something right.

Anyway, enough about me. Maybe I will hand the forum over to Goblin again next time. She knows some card tricks.

Yes, that was my dog who blogged yesterday. I, Faustus’s guest blogger, was in Baltimore putting together Ikea furniture for my best friend, who required a homosexual’s decorating touch. Faustus may be darting from Jewish ghetto to concentration camp in Eastern Europe, but I now have enough hex tools to festoon a chandelier. Who has the better deal?

I am not sure I should let Goblin stand in for me again. She might get on her high horse, and a Boston terrier on a high horse, while a sight to behold, is a terrible thing indeed.

Does anyone need any advice? We are good at that.

The world according to Goblin Foo Uvula.

Me me me! It’s me!

*lick lick lick lick lick lick*

Uncle Faustus is taking a break from his search for love in Manhattan and said I could write in his blog. Me me me! He said I’m searching for love in Manhattan too. But I kinda found it because his dog A. is my lesbian lover. She’s bi.

*snork*

Uncle Faustus never mentions A. but he knit her a sweater in the shape of a dinosaur. My daddy never knits me sweaters. Daddy sometimes takes me to the park but not today because he hurt his foot. Daddy says that Uncle Faustus is a bossy bottom even though he only knows because Uncle Faustus told him and not from real life. Daddy sleeps with Uncle Bobby. Sometimes he makes me go in my crate and all kinds of noise happens outside and I don’t know what’s going on.

What’s a bossy bottom?

A. says she knows but she won’t tell me so I don’t think she really knows. A. doesn’t have a crate but she has a bag.

*yawn snork growl*

I know all kinds of secrets people don’t think I know but I know them. I have my own blog with my daddy but he almost never lets me write even though he named it after me. I’m the only Boston terrier with an advice column but I’d trade it all for a sweater shaped like a dinosaur.

*whine*

With the help of the contractor, I have chosen paint colors for my room.

When I get back from Prague, one of my walls will be blue seafoam. The other three walls will be—I’m not making this up—icy moon drops.

I think icy moon drops must be the gayest color ever.

And on that note, goodbye for a few days. You’ll be in good hands with these two guest blogging.

By this time tomorrow I will be on a flight to the Czech Republic. I am being sent there to do research by a producer who has commissioned me to write the score for a musical about Terezin, the concentration camp just outside of Prague.

People keep telling me to have a great time.

I will be spending a day in the Jewish ghetto, a day interviewing Holocaust survivors, and two days at a concentration camp. I’m not sure what it will be like, but somehow “a great time” seems unlikely to be an apt description.

In my absence, so that my loyal if small fan base might not feel abandoned, this man and his dog will be guest blogging for me. None of us is quite sure yet how this will work, but we hope you will enjoy it. If you don’t, blame the Nazis. If it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be going to begin with.

I just hope I’ll be allowed to take my knitting needles on the plane.

Because otherwise it’s going to be a hell of a long ride.

My immediate supervisor at my day job has been out of town this past week, so her duties were distributed among the support staff in her absence. A co-worker and I got the job of assigning tasks as they came in (it’s a little more complicated than this but it would be so mind-numbingly dull to describe that reading it would probably cause you to become narcoleptic).

Ordinarily I don’t care about my day job at all. I waltz in late, leave early, do just enough work to appear competent, and spend as much time as possible eating and gossiping with the other support staffers.

The taste of power changed everything.

I became angry when I thought co-workers weren’t working hard enough. I stayed two hours late yesterday to make sure everything got done. Someone called in sick today and I was certain she was lying.

Thank God my supervisor gets back tomorrow, because I am beginning to love this way too much.

I have volunteered to write the songs for a kids’ show being put on by a group that uses theater to teach life skills to kids from Hell’s Kitchen. The kids write plays with songs in them that they then perform along with adult actors and directors. But the songs need music, which is where I come in.

The problem here is that these are street kids and they have written songs that are clearly intended to be R&B ballads and hip hop dance numbers.

I am about as capable of writing a hip hop dance number as I am of laying an egg.

Maybe I can convince them that some nice Viennese waltzes would be more dramatically appropriate.

Yesterday, in a sharp departure from my policy of waiting for him to get in touch with me, I e-mailed W.F. and asked him if he wanted to get together some time.

This turned out to be a mistake.

I got an e-mail back from him today saying he’d love to get together but not on a date, because he didn’t want to be dating anybody right now.

I hate him.

Even if he is a fat sexual compulsive who has any number of good reasons not to want to be dating anybody right now.

Or ever.

Tonight I had an altogether new experience, which I am going to call an undate.

Several weeks ago I got a response to my planet out ad from a guy named N.N. who was about to move to New York. His e-mail and profile were charming, but the picture in his profile was so unattractive that I knew I could never love him. So I e-mailed him and told him that, since posting the ad, I had acquired a boyfriend (neither completely true nor completely false), but that I’d still love to meet him if he was interested in making friends in the city.

So he moved here a couple weeks ago and we arranged to meet tonight. I was surprised to see that he was nowhere near as unattractive as his picture made him seem. I mean, he’s no Peter Bacanovic, but I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers. (Of course, the way I have been leading my life lately, it’s difficult to imagine somebody I would kick out of bed for eating crackers, but that’s neither here nor there.)

In any case, things were fine for a while, until he asked about my boyfriend. The problem, of course, was that when I first wrote him, I had two reasonable facsimiles of a boyfriend, and now I have none.

So I lied.

I am a terrible liar.

The more I said, the less sense I made and the less believable I was, and so the more I felt I had to say to try to make more sense and be more believable, and so the less—well, you get the picture. In the end I wove such a Byzantine tissue of lies, truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, and pi-truths that I clearly sounded like a creature from another planet.

So it doesn’t matter if I decide he’s attractive enough for me to love, because he thinks I am an ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE.

How do I get myself into these situations?

I got a reply to my planet out profile from someone with the user name “serious top.” The subject line was “your the one.” I quote his message in full (N.B.: to appreciate his response, you must know that in my profile I refer to both skydiving and chocolate chip cookies):

“our first date will be skydiving, chocolate chip cookies, fucking and a
lot of conversation to find out about each other. However, right not I
can say I love you.”

Right not I can say I love you?

The ambiguity here is almost too much to bear. I might have to respond, if only to find out what this could possibly mean.

In which case maybe we can just do the skydiving, cookies, and fucking and skip the conversation to find out about each other.

Come to think of it, that’s not a bad general rule for dating.