The Real Mission Impossible

Does anyone still actually want to see Tom Cruise in a movie?

And for that matter, Capote as a villian?

Tit for Tat

IN a slight change from my more philosophical slants to my entries lately, I have a rant to make. The other day I received an email from a gay blog that stated basically that he had a link to me and unless I put a link to his site on mine he would remove the one on his site.

Well, to that I say “Fuck You!” I couldn’t believe the nerve of this guy. For me, I link up to people’s whose writing I enjoy reading regularly and also a longer list of sites that I have looked at. I just thought it was courteous. Now, I can be a bit slack about adding people in – you know that ten seconds of extra time needed just seems so much more painful than it actually is – but its all in the spirit of letting people check other sites out.

But this ultimatum made me completely furious. Don’t get me wrong, I am always happy to find a link to myself on someone else’s blog, but trying to exact some sort of price for that “privilege” is just ludicrous.

I Ran

I received an email from a reader the other day that I just couldn’t bring myself to respond to. It was from a gay guy in Iran who had recently visited Europe and was overwhelmed by the possibility of being gay in a free society. He asked me for advice on how to find someone to love and I just couldn’t respond.

First off, what the fuck do I know about finding love. For me, its always just happened. There never was any plan or any scheme to find my one and only. Bud and I just lucked into each other.

Secondly, how the hell do I help someone who is gay and in Iran of all places. It certainly has given me pause. I see that so many of my squabbles with how gay people are treated here are really not all that bad when considered relative to what other people in the world go through. Of course, my basis for relatively inside my own culture must be other people who live in this society (or else what is the point?), but I definitely understand that a lot of people are far worse off. I cannot imagine having to live with being gay in a place where it is subject to the death penalty.

We here in the West have made much progress on the acceptability of gays and lesbians. Of that there can be no doubt. And I can only imagine the intense envy of someone living outside of that construct. I have written before about how the internet has given many young gay people the chance to realize that they are not alone. That there is a world out there that is just like them and that there are places where they will be accepted. But this is only good for those people that can actually get there. What about those who can see that there is this utopia (from their perspective), but do not have any means or way to get there? What kind of hell is it to have the piece of food within view, but without the reach to end starvation?

My hearts aches for what these people have to go through. The torment that they will likely live with for the rest of their lives.

And I have no answers for this young man.

I have no advice to give.

I have no right to give hope.

And I find myself only thanking that this is where and when I was born and praying that the times will change in more worlds that the one before my eyes and beneath my feet.

Conceive

I was walking home from work the other day taking full advantage of the wonderful warm weather and I was struck by an extraordinary commonplace fact. Each person that I passed was completely different from the next. And I am not speaking of personality here, just sole physicality. And for once, I considered this strange occurrence.

Strange in its unique status among other animals on this planet. But the more I thought about it the more I began to wonder whether this was actually the case. Can’t people tell their dogs apart from others of the same breed? Is there really such a divergence between the differences between humans and those between other animals. Perhaps, to flip an old joke, to animals, we all look the same.

But then I began to wonder about how this is then a question of perspective. A number of years ago when I was working in a bar, whenever I would request something from a manager friend of mine, she would always respond by “You really do think that the world revolves around you, don’t you?” And the answer is “Of course.” One of the fascinating things about our existence, to me at least, is the singular perspective that we have. No matter what any of us our doing we always look at things through our eyes, feel things through our skin, and experience things through our bodies. No matter how much we may try to empathize with others, even that empathy is filtered through the lens of our perceptions. We are never able to experience a single thing where the world does not revolve around ourselves.

And it is through this constancy of body that we build our ideas of personality. Since I have always existed inside of this same body and experienced things through this same entity and set of organs, the person within must be the same. But perhaps this is a great fallacy, a lie that we have constructed based on this uniform perspective that is impossible to escape. While I would recognize my physical self from ten years ago should it appear suddenly in front of me (I have seen the photographic evidence of my youth!), but would I recognize that person at all. Can I really say that who I am today and that person are truly one and the same.

I often hear talk about people changing (or not changing) and the constant evolution that is sweetly phrased “growing up” – but what does this all mean? If there are things that I do now that I never would have even considered before, I am the same person then? Of course, it comes done to a question of classification in the end. Do you maintain your personality and merely see it change over the course of a lifetime or is life an experience as a multitude of different persons that inhabit the same body linked together by the illusory wrapping of memory and body?

One thing is for certain though, at any age I have been able to have my mind wander from noticing that people all look different to considering the basis of consciousness. Maybe my parents were smoking a little something when I was conceived.

And that word itself is perhaps a link to the puzzle for I have often found our choice of words to describe our collective understanding. To conceive or have a concept is normally used to describe the act of forming something in the mind. But in the context of birth it is meant as a physical rather than a mental one. However, maybe conception is more of a mental idea than I previously thought. For if to be conceived is for the thought of who I am to be created, to emerge from nothing, then this is what conception is. For it may be from that moment on, an idea of myself begins. From my parents contemplating who I will become to my own belief about who I am, these are all merely conceptions surrounding a physical being.

The Rundown

When I was nineteen my parents got divorced. This hardly came as any big surprise to me. I knew for most of my life that they weren’t in love with each other but I never ever saw them fight. The lack of love was pretty easy to see however – my Mom, who would celebrate the anniversary of losing a tooth, never celebrated her wedding anniversary. But both of my parents came from broken families, and when they got married they vowed that they would stay together until all three of us kids were grown up.

This is not a good plan for people who despise each other and I think it was easier for my Dad who did truly love my mother. But my Mom always wanted something else – she always saw that what she had was far less than what she wanted. And I think that it was passion.

My Dad wasn’t exactly a passionate man with her, and how can I blame the guy since she stayed mainly for us kids and not for him. Not exactly a big incentive to lay out the love. Dad has since remarried to a woman that he was sweethearts with when they were six years old, and to see the two of them together all mushy and gushy in love, he is hardly recognizable.

My Mom on the other hand spent the last ten years hoping to fall in love. She was with a complete asshole for about five of the past years. He was a controlling psychologically abusive man who I finally convinced her to leave one night. She stayed with him through a lot of shit because she was always hopeful that there would be passion.

And I can see myself reflected in this. When I met Bud nearly four years ago in Australia, I was, as I have mentioned before, with someone else. But when we met I got swept up in a torrent of passion with him that I was helpless to resist. I knew that he was bad news from the start for me (but in such a good way), but I was paralyzed and unable to help myself from seeing him. For those three months before I had to leave Sydney, we were caught in the incredibly exciting beginning of a relationship where there is an enormous thrill is just being beside one another.

We couldn’t keep our hands off each other and every minor parting was filled with the sense of emptiness at his absence. I remember talking to a girlfriend of mine back in Montreal during this time and wondering whether it was Bud that was pulling me away from my then current boyfriend or if I was just missing the passion.

If it was the latter then I knew that I was going to be in trouble. Because the passion does not stay. Eventually, the passion fades as the titan of familiarity overtakes it. Bud and I are definitely less passionate with each other than at the beginning. We went though months of a four times a day excitement to the far less frequency that exists at the moment. And many of the simple passionate things like long kisses seem relegated to the past. Holding hands together is more the oddity than the norm.

Now there are undoubtedly a lot of wonderful things that come from a long-term relationship and I wouldn’t trade Bud in for anyone. I love him deeply and I can’t see that changing. But I worry about the craving for passion. This is not a craving for the excitement of sexual conquest or the thrill of the first kiss with someone new. Part of it is the exploration of a new person and also the excitement that comes with the ego-stroking realization that someone really likes you. And I would be a liar if I said that I didn’t miss that passion of long ago.

And I don’t want to end up where my mother was at – yearning for passion above all else. But I recognize in myself a craving for that excitement. However, the best part of this craving is that I am not craving having that passion with anyone else other than Bud. And so, I’ve got to figure out a plan of attack. Part of it has to do with getting back into shape. My main drive in my return to crazy workouts has not been for myself but to reinvigorate Bud. But the passion also has to take other forms. Its been hard when I’ve been working such long hours to get myself motivated to get out and actually do things in my time off (but winter doesn’t help there either), but I’ve got to get this going.

In a long-term relationship I can’t expect the passion to just return without any work from me. And while I know that I don’t want to find it with anyone else – I can’t possibly be sure that Bud wouldn’t want it. I know that he loves me deeply, but that tsunami of emotion that comes with a grand passion can be very difficult to resist.

I know that better than anyone. And if I want to avoid what many would call a karmic justice, I’ve got to think of something.

The Plastics

On the weekend I watched a couple of movies from the early nineties including that wonder of cinematic prowess Showgirls! Yes, trashy, poorly acted, tripe stuff – but so funny.

And what struck me most were the tits. Yes, a gay blog talking about women’s tits – I guess its one of those days. But what really got my going was the fact that all of the woman who were exposed had such small breasts. No, that’s not it – their breasts were all normal sized. In the space of just over a decade the “typical” size of a Hollywood set of tits has exploded. What the fuck is going on here!?!

To me, this is a very odd thing. Bud remarked on it as well that whenever you watch a movie from the seventies, everyone seems so flat. Shit, we watched 9 to 5 recently, and even Dolly Parton doesn’t seem very well endowed any longer.

We have become these weird obsessed by plastic surgery animals nowadays that it is getting to the level of freakiness. Now, not everyone on screen has monster breasts, but for every Cameron Diaz or Debra Messing, there are dozens of other actresses who have had their assets grown by means other than nature. And are the men any better? Why is it that on Survivor, which I love, do the men’s bodies start to look incredibly sexy after a month of starvation? Have we hit such an extreme in fashion that near-death is now the height of sexiness?

And the botox craze is no better. While watching American Idol last week Kenny Rogers could barely move his face. The world of the expressionless is upon us. And for what purpose?

Of course, I realize that Hollywood is not exactly representative of reality – but we’re not as far removed from it as we think. In a month, the website www,plasticassets.com, got 130,000 people to sign up for a credit card with the “gift” of free implants. While it was shown to be a hoax, the response was not fake.

I remember reading once a number of years ago in an interview an actor was saying how much he hated Brad Pitt because since his appearance in Thelma & Louise, everyone was expected to have perfect abs. And I can see this. I remember the salvia dripping down my chin in that scene and the thrill of seeing those perfectly sculpted muscles. And part of it was due to its being unique. And now, everyone has them for a shirtless scene. We are still in the hairless, fatless sexy stage. Does anyone actually think that a Gerard Dépardieu could ever be considered a sex symbol again. While it was a stretch at the time, now it seems utterly ridiculous.

Ho-Hum

Haven’t really been in much of a mood to post anything lately. Everything I start to write seems so pathetic or so completely devoid of any merit whatsoever.

So instead of my often meaningless scribbles, I leave you with some eye-candy for the weekend.

Best Laid Plans

Well, it is official – Bud and I are pathetic.

While once we were able to sustain entire weekends of non-stop partying, now we are lucky to make it to midnight.

As I previously noted, we were planning on heading out on Friday night. It was a balmy 20 C (four degrees higher than the previous record temperature) and we were ready for a night out. It all started well. Sangria after I got home at 5 and then we headed out for dinner. The plan was after dinner we would head out for some drinks somewhere.

Sushi for dinner at the unheard of hour of 6:00 (as we were both starving!) accompanied by copious amounts of sake was probably not the wisest of ideas for a couple of guys out of shape (in the boozing it up sense). We were finished dinner well before eight and were already suitably smashed.

When we got home, we got a call from a friend, Claude to head out to the strippers later on with him and his landlord. I was not however expecting his arrival at our place before nine. Sad to say, Bud was already in bed (although this was caused by a “bedtime” activity of our own. The bell rings and I snap to attention, waking Bud up and putting on the hostess-with-the-mostest smile. And Bud heads to the bathroom to prepare to head out.

In my inebriated state I couldn’t tell if he was in the bathroom for 10 minutes or an hour, but Bud later said he was there for quite a while praying to that porcelain god and giving his sacrifice. I, the ignorant one in the living room, attempted to make conversation while barely being able to speak. Oh, so sad.

Finally Bud emerged and we were off. Before we could even get around the corner, Bud was asking for the keys to the house to return to that prostrate state on the floor of the bathroom. I, unaware of the extent of his gastronomical troubles, proceeded to the strippers and enjoyed a jolly good time abusing the near nakedness of those wonderful employees. Around 11:30, realizing that Bud had not arrived, I decided to stumble my own way home, but not before running into a business colleague and once again foolishly attempting to speak comprehensibly.

Finally returned home even before the clock had struck midnight to find the boy passed out on the couch. And I was not far behind.

If we are going to survive our planned wild days of summer, we better get back into the game.

Sad sad sad!!