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Words I have had trouble remembering in the last week:

luminary
algorithm
commemorate

I see two possibilities:

1. It’s early-onset Alzheimer’s.
2. The gods are punishing me for the paper I wrote in eighth grade about weathermen in which I suggested that people start getting less intelligent once they hit 30.

Either way, my chances don’t look too good.

Those of you who have had the good fortune to meet my dog A. will undoubtedly testify that she is the friendliest creature on the planet. Anytime she comes within yards of a human being, she goes nearly mad with joy, leaping about, tail wagging, hoping against hope to be petted or talked to or played with, and, even if that hope is left unfulfilled, generally so glad to be alive she can melt even the coldest of hearts. Furthermore, she is utterly indiscriminate in the bestowal of her affection; I suspect that even a reprobate on the order of Injustice Antonin Scalia would receive the same treatment as wonderful people like you and me.

So.

The other night, A. and I were at E.S.’s place. I was surfing the web, E.S. was studying in the next room for some sort of test the hospital was giving him the next day, and A. was lounging on the couch with him, when there came a knock on the door. Now, E.S.’s building is very small; the only other people who live there are the owners, E.S.’s sister, and his ex-boyfriend E.W., who hates my guts. Neither E.S.’s sister nor the owners ever stop by, so this had to be E.W. In the past, when E.W. has knocked on the door, I have tended to hide either behind the refrigerator or in the bathroom. But this time, E.S. was in the other room and didn’t hear the knock, and so, despite E.W.’s terrible, terrible temper, I thought, “Oh, fuck it. I’m sick of hiding from this man either behind the refrigerator or in the bathroom and I’m sick of his refusing to speak to me or even look at me when I do have the misfortune to encounter him. I’m going to answer the door and he can just fucking deal with it.”

So I did. And we had a remarkably civil and pleasant conversation in the brief time it took E.S. to make his way to the door from the other room, followed by A. E.W. looked at her, bent down and beckoned, and said in a dog-friendly voice, “This must be A.!”

And she didn’t move a muscle.

My dog, who would dance happily around Tom’s de Torquemada if he happened to walk through the door, stood stock still.

He tried again. “Come on, A.! That’s a good girl! Come on, A.!”

At which point she went and hid under the table.

“Sometimes she gets shy around strangers,” I lied gleefully.

The three of us finished our conversation and E.W. left. A. emerged from under the table to fulsome praise from Yours Truly.

It’s one thing to have a cute and cuddly and furry and friendly animal that gets so excited every time you come home, you feel for a brief moment that you’re not totally alone in the world.

But an animal that hates your enemies is a gift with a price above rubies.

My friend N.M. says that, whenever she hears anybody speaking German, no matter what they’re actually saying, she thinks they’re saying, “Jews, get on the train.”

Last Sunday, I planned to meet E.S. for lunch during the gay pride march. Uncharacteristically, I was on time; even more uncharacteristically, he was late. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said, “but I was watching the parade and the gay policemen and firemen came by, so I couldn’t leave.”

I’ve known for some time that E.S. is a sucker for a man in uniform, but I didn’t know that the effect was so strong as to overcome his almost pathological compulsion to be on time.

This started me thinking. “I know E.S. is really into me and thinks I’m really sexy,” I thought. “But if I become a fireman, then he’ll think I’m even sexier than he already does.” I started fantasizing about life as a fireman, going out and saving lives and then coming home all dirty and sweaty and having E.S. massage my sore muscles and strip off my fireman’s uniform and–well, you get the idea. Plus, becoming a fireman would allow me to do something with my life that helped people in a very real and concrete way–I mean, writing pretty music is all well and good, but sometimes the benefits to humanity are a little hard to make out.

In any case, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got. Finally, yesterday, I went to the New York Fire Department web site and started investigating.

And was stopped cold by the realization that I am too old to become a fireman. To be eligible to take the open-competitive Firefighters Examination, you have to be under 29 years old; the next exam is in October of 2006, at which point I will be 33.

Devastated, I called E.S. and told him all about the destruction of my dream. He consoled me with the information that, if I’m too old to become a fireman, it also means I’m too old to develop schizophrenia.

I told him the voices said he was wrong.

Monday evening I had some friends over to do something so shameful that I hesitate to blog about it. One might suspect that the orgies, sex clubs, and pornographic movies that have comprised my not-so-distant past would place me safely beyond the reach of shame.

One would be wrong, however, because what we did was play Dungeons & Dragons.

For those of you who were normal, well-adjusted teenagers, Dungeons & Dragons is a role-playing game invented by a crazy person named Gary Gygax in the mid- to late 1970s and popular since then with high school nerds and social misfits of all ages. Players create characters of various races (elf, human, gnome, etc.) and classes (mage, paladin, druid, etc.) and band together to go on adventures, fight monsters, win treasure, and forget momentarily the fact that they are acne-ridden losers who will go to their graves without ever having sex.

Though I certainly played my share of Dungeons & Dragons as a youth, I seem somehow to have overcome both the acne and the lack of sex. However, in recent conversations with various friends, I discovered that they, too, played Dungeons & Dragons as youths. Perhaps there’s something about a hidden shameful past that draws people who share it together, sort of like how the closeted gay kids in high school all seemed to become friends without saying a word about their secret. I’ll skip over the details of how the members of our cabal found each other; suffice it to say that at 6:00 Monday, seven hardy souls, whose names I will never reveal, not even under torture of the worst kind, gathered together to play D&D.

At first we were utterly overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the rules. I am amazed that I ever even comprehended them, much less knew them intimately enough to play with confidence. There were charts for how fast you could move depending on what you were carrying, charts for how vulnerable you were to attacks by petrification, charts for how likely you were to be able to memorize a spell you found. Terms like THAC0 and Armor Class and Hit Dice jumbled themselves confusingly together to befuddle us all.

In the end, we decided more or less to wing it.

The first thing you have to do when playing Dungeons & Dragons is create a character. My character was a human mage named Zoltan the Vengeful; Zoltan was an exact physical replica of me except ten pounds lighter. He was accompanied on his adventure by Friar Thomas of Middling Tolerance, a human priest; Treegrass Rootleafstamen, an elven ranger and secret environmental terrorist; Sunshine Joyslayer, a half-elven bard; Pennyroyal, a dwarven fighter/thief [N.B.: pennyroyal is an herb that was used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to induce abortion]; and Spotsylvania Jones, M.A., a thief who was either a gnome or a half-elf (the player started out as a gnome but for some reason my memory is telling me he changed his mind and became a half-elf). My backstory was that Zoltan the Vengeful was a closeted homosexual and was in love with Sunshine Joyslayer; I confided this information only to the Dungeon Master (the player running the whole thing) and to Spotsylvania Jones, M.A.

For the next four hours, we all sat appalled as sentences like “I speak Orcish–I listen through the door and try to understand what they’re saying” and “I have a 30% chance to detect hidden portals” flowed ever more easily from our mouths. At one point, we turned a corner in the ruined castle and a “jelly-like substance of a disgusting ochre color” fell on Treegrass Rootleafstamen and Pennyroyal. “Zoltan leaps out of the way,” I said, “to make sure his robes aren’t stained.”

I’d intended to give Zoltan a gradual and tortured coming-out process over the course of the game. At first this went well, despite Spotsylvania Jones, M.A.’s thinly veiled threats to expose Zoltan unless he agreed to go left at the fork rather than right. Soon enough, though, I was so addled from trying to keep track of the rules and so horrified to be saying things like “I cast a Burning Hands spell at the wraith” that complex character development was beyond me. Eventually I gave up and said, “While we’re recovering from the gargoyle attack, Zoltan puts the moves on Sunshine Joyslayer.” To my delight, Sunshine Joyslayer felt desperate enough in his girlfriend’s absence to succumb to Zoltan’s advances. Unfortunately, however, the honeymoon didn’t last long.

“Through the mist in the tunnel,” said the Dungeon Master, “you see a giant centipede curled up.”

“Zoltan holds hands with Sunshine Joyslayer,” I said.

“You can’t hold hands with me,” said Sunshine Joyslayer’s player. “I’m trying to play a morale-boosting song on my harp.”

Men have said that to me before and I’ve always taken it at face value, but somehow this time I found it hard to buy.

By the time the clock struck midnight, we were all exhausted and, though we were only halfway through the dungeon, we decided to call it quits. The Dungeon Master revealed the secret of the ruined castle, we all gasped, and everybody went home. The only mystery left is what exactly Spotsylvania Jones’s M.A. was in.

Perhaps, if we don’t all die of shame, we’ll play again someday and find out.

After I graduated from college, I hung around for a couple years trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life before I came to an inevitable bad end; while I did this, I served as a resident advisor in a freshman dorm. This mainly involved listening to my students cry and organizing parties. This was most easily done by coordinating with the holidays: a Hallowe’en party in October, a Thanksgiving party in November. Come December, many of the RA groups arranged Secret Santa parties.

This is, for those of you raised by wolves, how Secret Santa works: members of a group gather and all write their names on pieces of paper, which they then put into a hat or bowl or similarly concave container. Everybody picks a name and, for X number of days before Christmas (or whatever date has been selected for the Secret Santa party), people leave anonymous gifts for the people whose names they’ve chosen. This all culminates in an event at which people try to guess who their anonymous benefactors have been during the previous days.

In any event, many resident advisors, aware that the demographic of the college was not uniformly Christian, came up with other names for the event so as not to marginalize or exclude students of other faiths. One RA did “Secret Snowflakes,” which, while it did the trick, made me want to hurl. Another did “Secret Non-Denominational Holiday Gift Givers,” which I must admit to liking; the problem was that it didn’t take into account students who didn’t traditionally celebrate any sort of winter holiday, denominational or no. Forcing them to be Secret Non-Denominational Holiday Gift Givers might marginalize or exclude them, which would defeat the purpose of renaming the event. Other RAs came up with other solutions, but none of them really worked for me.

So I decided that my group would do Secret Saturnalians.

Saturnalia was, for those of you raised by wolves, the ancient Roman holiday (celebrated on December 25) that eventually gave way to Christmas. I had a student from Hungary and another from Greece, but as my charges were all under the age of 19, it was a scientific impossibility that any of them could have been born in the Roman Empire before 391 A.D. (the year Emperor Theodosius outlawed the traditional pagan Roman religion). So by celebrating Saturnalia, my students would not only spread joy and goodwill throughout the group but also learn to appreciate a different cultural tradition. I didn’t make them wear ancient Roman dress, but they did have to wander around wishing each other “io Saturnalia” (the traditional greeting), and I threw a party at the end. I wanted to make some traditional ancient Roman holiday snacks, but I couldn’t find a single pet store willing to sell me a thousand larks once I told them I was going to cut out the larks’ tongues and marinate them in red wine.

Okay, I just watched the eleventh episode in the fourth season of Queer as Folk, and here’s the thing:

I’ve never been to Pittsburgh, but aren’t there any people of color there?

Yesterday I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and learned what I already knew, that our country is ruled by liars and recidivists oh wait to be a recidivist you have to have stopped committing crimes at some point, and then I went over to E.S.’s place and watched NOW With Bill Moyers and learned about how Alan Greenspan is quite literally mortgaging our country’s future and then I read the New York Times and learned that although the FCC won’t tell anybody what words they’re not allowed to say evidently “go fuck yourself” is totally fine so long as it’s the vice president who says it to a senator who criticizes his blatant cronyism and so long as he feels better afterwards and then I wondered what I or any of us could possibly do about any of this, other than going out and getting a gun and shooting all the Republicans we know whoops I don’t know any Republicans, since Antonin Scalia disenfranchised everybody in America or at least everybody in America that Katherine Harris hadn’t already disenfranchised and I just thank God we live in the greatest democracy in the world; otherwise I might be worried.

Yesterday, I went to City Quilter to buy material for the quilting class I’m starting next week.

Then I went to That’s SO Gay: Tales of Extremely Gay Gayness, where I performed a really, really gay cabaret song to which I’d written both the words and the music.

Then I knitted on the subway home.

This afternoon, I successfully auditioned to become an aerobics instructor at the Paris Health Club. (I’m officially on their sub list until the new season starts in September.)

In an hour, after walking my Maltese, I’m going to go to my boyfriend’s apartment in Brooklyn and have anal sex.

I’m not hubristic enough to think that I’m the gayest person ever, but I’m nevertheless pleased with the amount of gayness I’ve managed to concentrate in my body.

Yesterday, E.S. and I went to Baltimore to visit David and his boyfriend. At one point during the visit, David and I were discussing how much better things would be if we ran the world. E.S. said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

I asked him what he could possibly mean.

“I don’t see any problem with David’s running the world,” he said. “Just you. You’re too punitive and vengeful.”

I fixed him with a gimlet eye and said, “Just you wait. You’ll find out how punitive and vengeful I can be.”

Then, head held high, I turned on my heel and tried to walk through a closed screen door.