Author Archives: Joel Derfner

While out walking my dog this evening, I passed by a corner box that held Gay City News, a “weekly newspaper serving gay, lesbian, bi & transgendered New York City.”

Someone had written the following request on the top of the box: “GOOD PLEASE NO GAYS + LESVIANES.” Elsewhere the same person had written, “GOOD LOVES YOU,” and elsewhere still, “ONLY MEN & WOMAN.”

Really all this did, other than causing my dog to strain at her leash to get away from the poor syntax, was fill me with an intense and burning desire for a lesviane. Does anybody know where I can get one?

Everyone should come see this Tuesday’s WYSIWYG Talent Show at P.S. 122. There may be a few tickets left if you call 212-477-5288.

I’ll be singing a song, reading some haiku, and also reading something from what I hope will turn out to be my second book.

Or perhaps I’ll just show up drunk and cry.

Either way it should be entertaining.

Well, that was clearly a roaring success.

I want to die.

(“Oh,” I hear you say. “That means it must be a weekday.”)

But I want to die even more than usual. Because today I consumed no caffeine and no sugar.

I did this because I hoped that taking such a step might allow me to wake up tomorrow at some point later than 6:00 a.m., the hour at which I have been sitting bolt upright in bed every morning for the last month.

We’ll see if it works, but even if it does I think I’m going to have to settle for being awake at that hour rather than giving up Diet Coke and M&Ms.

Because this is so horrible as to defy description.

Apparently there is some nonsense called “doctor-patient privilege” that prevents E.S. from telling me the most intimate details of his patients’ lives. Nevertheless, as long as he withholds identifying information, he can tell me vague stories every once in a while.

The recent upshot of all this is that, as fucked up as my brain chemistry is, I’d still rather be me than somebody who thinks he’s a fish.

Everyone must go here at once to see “Fashion Highs and Lows of the Westboro Baptist Church.” C. Monks, whoever you are, I think I love you.

Thanks to her for the link.

When I was eleven or twelve, I wandered into a Walden Books and picked up a copy of The Necronomicon, a book ostensibly written by the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, a character from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. The Necronomicon purported to contain instructions on opening a gateway to other dimensions, other worlds populated by the Elder Gods, Old Ones with names like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth who, if begged with the proper humility and terror, might deign to show up suddenly and eat us all.

Naturally, I began making the necessary preparations immediately.

Unfortunately, the instructions were somewhat vague, consisting in large part of lines like, “I have smelled the vapors of that Ancient One, Queen of the Outside, whose name is writ in the terrible MAGAN text, the testament of some dead civilization whose priests, seeking power, swing open the dread, evil Gate for an hour past the time, and were consumed.” This was very exciting to me–minus the confusing shift in tense, of course–but somewhat lacking in specifics. Was the “cruel gibbering” that needed to “pour forth like vomitous bile from my mouth” supposed to be in English? If not, could I do it in grammatically correct but unidiomatic French, or did it have to be Arabic? Or something else? I was happy to put forth the effort to study any language necessary, but the opportunities, in South Carolina in 1985, were doubtless few and far between.

In the end my efforts were stymied by my inability to gather the appropriate materials. Coal was no problem; neither was a stick of yew wood two cubits long and as big around as my thumb. But when I actually sat down with the newspaper and looked at the price of gold, I realized that buying enough to beat out a thin sheet as big as my palm would take months and months of my allowance, and that was money I simply had to have to buy stickers for my sticker books.

One of my favorite things about E.S. is that, since he is a psychiatrist, he can and does diagnose people at the drop of a hat. Other people on the subway, people we pass on the street, my friends. But the best is when he diagnoses characters on TV shows. He does this not only with Law & Order, since crazy people are a regular feature on that program, but also with fantasy shows like Wonderfalls, whose heroine (according to E.S.) was experiencing first-break schizophrenia, and even with cartoons. He claims that Stewie on The Family Guy has an anxiety-spectrum disorder.

But E.S.’s ability to diagnose people even when they are pixillated and three inches tall is what allows me to tell you that Tom Cruise, who recently exposed himself on Oprah and Access Hollywood, is bipolar and has gone off his medications. It’s true; my psychiatrist boyfriend says so.

Note to self: after mincing jalape

Because of the dreadful weather, when I showed up to teach my step-and-sculpt class, there was no one there. Delighted that I might have the hour free, I decided nevertheless to wait fifteen minutes before going home. I was about to turn the lights off and leave when a woman came in to do the class. She had a foreign accent and turned out to be from Paris. She was very considerate; she said there was no point in doing the class with one student, as it would be just as easy for her to go and lift on the machines outside. But, full of bitterness, I told her that if she'd come for the class we should do the class.

And it was a total blast. First, because it was great to be able to focus my teaching on one person's specific needs, and second, because I did the class in French.

Actually, that's not completely accurate, as my French wasn't quite up to translating sentences like "give me some hip!" and "I know you've got more attitude in you than that!" idiomatically on the fly as I danced around a plastic platform.

But when it came to shouting "rétez trois fois!" and "magnifique, vraiment magnifique!" I was smoother than Maurice Chevalier.