Does intimacy invite honesty?

Atari’s post about honest within the blogging community after creating contacts got me to thinking. Do we become more (GODDAM YOU FUCKHEADS OUTSIDE STOP SINGING THOSE STUPID GUITAR SONGS EVERYONE KNOWS WITH YOUR FRIENDS WHILE MAKING ALL OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD DOGS BARK. TWIST AND SHOUT? COME ON! YOU’RE WORSE THAN THE HOMELESS GUY AT THE CIVIC CENTER STOP WITH HIS VIOLIN WHO HAS NO IDEA HOW TO PLAY AND DOES THE SAME THING EVEN AFTER A YEAR! I WANT SOMETHING ELSE!? INDEED!) decietful the more we know someone? I find that I’m usually an open book to people I don’t know. I always figure that I have nothing to lose in telling them anything (oh no, does that mean I’m that person at bars when I get drunk? yet another reason to stop drinking).

When JR and I first met, I was extremely honest. However, there was no tact in my honesty. It seems anymore that I’m not completely averse to the common practice of just saying things because it’s what is polite. Maybe I just don’t have the skills to do something clever otherwise.

I was also listening to Dannation’s podcast, and it was fun to hear Brett Cajun on there. I actually linked to him early on in my blogging career. And then I felt it was simply unkind. You see, I was going there merely to laugh at how ridiculous he was. Yes, I am pretentious, and in this case, I’m sure that there is much more to the man than what I simply see (although I had such paroxsyms at his mention of writing a novel). Sigh. But I think I will try it again. Or should I not read him? Was I right in the first place? I’m probably just not sophisticated (or human) enough to truly see past the flagrant “butchness”. I guess Atari’s post made me want to write something incendiary, and perhaps unkind, but I don’t mean it that way, I’m just being honest. Looking back at this paragraph, I’m wondering if I should return to my old ways…

Beyond that, JR and I are still going to the gym. And you all know that I don’t have really any goals other than not developing diabetes or sleep apnea. But it seems like the more I am there, the more susceptible I am to seeing all these photos on my street of the “adonis”/constructed to sell things body and thinking…I want that. In any case, I think there is one thing I want. I love bubble butts. And I want one. If anyone has a good workout routine for this, please send it immediately. PLEASE!

The photo is obviously not of my taking…

Beans…

We bought the 25 lb. bag of beans. Pinto beans in a large polyester sack sat on the bottom shelf with an ebullient cowboy caught in motion. 25 lbs. and the bag is heavy. We hadn’t brought a cart with us, only a basket. Beans were to be flavored with meat–beef bones, ham bones (no pork necks, smoked yet raw).

I sat the beans on the counter, and I peered into the bag. Between the synthetic lacing I could see small, little, sepia-speckled brown beans. The colander sat in the sink, and I showered the small stream into the metal. Turning on the faucet, I pulled my hands through the beans while sorting out the one “impurity” I found. On a second pass as I put the beans into a pot…prrrr…prrrr…sang the beans through the light of the kitchen as they went back and forth through my fingers. My ancestors signed their names with X’s.

The beans soaked, and the next morning I placed them in the slow cooker with other things–cumin, dried chilis, the pork neck. There was no fire to watch, and I was gone. Later the beans were there. Soft and sturdy, yet these beans were more than just my own.

The Rabbit and the Hole

Rabbits are known for breeding
furry spry creatures

Rabbits are good for eating
hung in a butcher shop with its limbs spread apart

Rabbits are good for wearing
the trappings of the robber baroness
the good luck charm of the young

but where is the Rabbit?

hairless, flayed and limbless

come out of your hole

Happy Leather Pride!

This is just a couple blocks out from my house. I just went out tonight (Friday night) to go pick JR and I up some RockStars (the energy drink). As I went out on to castro, the first thing I saw was a trouple (a three-person relationship) all holding hands together. Aww! Then about 50ft up from 18th and Castro, I see a guy peeing in the street. Then the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are doing some event on the corner. Every other guy is dark, muscular, and H-O-T-T-T. The air just reeks of sex. Every single restaurant has lines outside of it. It’s obvious there lots of tourists because even the crappy restaurants are busy.

I then see a sandwich thrown out of a window on the street. More hot guys. A guy in assless chaps. > Then I see some people I know, and the super hot bear who used to be the manager of our Wells Fargo here in the castro.

God, I love where I live…

Sameness/Difference

Since my introduction to the bologsphere, I have been surprised by what people think is one of its greatest aspects: sameness. The internet is a great tool that helps us sift through masses of information to find what is intersting to us–ourselves. Perhaps my bolgroll is a good example. Often in conversation with bloggers I have heard, “We’re the same.”
No.
And, yes.
A phrase that has stuck with me since my mission, “No one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” And who cares more about us than ourselves? Perhaps finding large commonalities opens us up to ask questions of ourselves when we come across those in whome we have built up to be the same who in turn turns out to actually be quite different.

Adam, the whore that he is, (just like Darin) often quotes the line from I heart Huckabees, “how am I not myself?” I don’t believe we are ever not ourselves. Perhpas we view our actions as inconsistent with other beliefs, and yet we have been socialized into all of our beliefs, or they are part of our innate and (just maybe) shared characteristics (genetic, perhaps).

I believe that when we are asking this question “How am I not myself,” we can begin to see the construction of ourselves. This gives us a glimpse into the invisible social construction, and being made bare, we can walk away with a greater understanding or do something else.

We can oppose the differences we see between us and the other; we can ignore them; or we can collapse them and resist. Maybe the resistance is what truly makes us individuals, and in turn we will rconstruct society in a different way.

Same, yet different.

Do you know what I hate?

I hate it when people say, “oh, hate is such a strong word. I just extremely dislike.” For fuck’s sake people, have some passion! We have the word hate for a reason! And hate doesn’t mean what a stupid person does because they lack understanding.

Here’s what dictionary.com says…

Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[heyt]
–verb (used with object)
1. to dislike intensely or passionately; feel extreme aversion for or extreme hostility toward; detest: to hate the enemy; to hate bigotry.
2. to be unwilling; dislike: I hate to do it.
–verb (used without object)
3. to feel intense dislike, or extreme aversion or hostility.
–noun
4. intense dislike; extreme aversion or hostility.
5. the object of extreme aversion or hostility.

I feel like people say this almost because they don’t want to be seen as stupid. It creates a distance between the pronouncecer and the utterance. This distance is seen as bestowing rationality on the speaker.

It’s just like “I hate the sin, not the sinner.” You create artificial distance to avoid being confronted. And just because you hate something doesn’t mean you will always hate it. And by saying you openly hate it, you probably have more oppotunities to learn more from people who will challenge you. And just because you learn something new doesn’t mean that you were “wrong” when you felt that way. You felt that way. Own up to it, and learn to process your feelings and learn about others and maybe learn something you thought (not felt) was wrong.

Go ahead now, hate me everyone for saying this!

"We are all born naked, and the rest is drag"-RuPaul

Just why do we wear clothes? I think we all have opinions on this. I believe that most people wear clothing to fit into a specific group. Bears wear a certain apparel. Gym queens have their threads (or lack thereof). Soccer mom’s have a style. We all create a certain outward appearance (as obvious as that may sound) to represent ourselves to others. It represents our choices, and perhaps values.

Quite often, I hear people in the castro bemoaning the older gentlemen who wear A&F. And why do they wear A&F? Is it because of pictures like the one above? What we wear carries so many presumptions: status, affiliation, attitude. I want to suggest that many of these gay men are in adolescence. Don’t we all remember when we first came out? There is this feeling of youth. A feeling of just beginning to know what it is like to pursue with a purpose, to have one’s heart stolen, to flirt and gossip with all of your heart.

I think that people should be able to dress as they please without condemnation or reproval. Admittedly, I may not like what they are wearing often, but I’m not going to tell them what they “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing.

Matt Blender said on one of his past podcasts how upset he is that everyone calls him a cub because he is not the size of the average twink. Granted this mostly came out of animosity of being associated with what he percieves “bear culture” to be, it’s telling how we group people according to traits and away from what is undefined in the gay community…the gay guy with a brain who dresses well and has a nice body and is thoughtful and considerate…or do we just call them A-listers? I think people should be able to dress and act as they feel. Old people should be able to have sex, run marathons, be flirtatious, have tantrums just as much as anybody else…even wear Abercrombie and Fitch. Hell, the people for whom it’s intended usually look silly in it.

Heck, if I were living according to “shoulds”, I “should” probably be married, and having children, and living in suburbia pretty soon. It may seem different, but is it really? In some ways, many people probably have the same reaction to the photo below as to the idea of gays getting married.

What’s wrong? Well, nothing really. But it just doesn’t seem right. We’ve been fed these images and been told so much about who and what is supposed to be doing this and that and how, that we allow it in without really evaluating what’s happening.

The most important speech is those we want to deny. And in a way, this is speech. We believe supposedly in free speech. The ideals we have are wonderful. However, it is where we begin to have issues that you can see the true operations of power in society, and this is where the unseen, the subtle, the unconscious discrimination can finally be unmasked be it ageism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or racism.

UPDATE

Daniel’s comment is too good to be left unread. He delves into a lot of things I was thinking about when I wrote this post (nominalism, philosophical realism, object/referent), but was too lazy to actually put in. Enjoy.

“There is a whole spectrum of value definition added to appearances that serves to buffer us as human beings from having to genuinely encounter one another as “whole” beings. We tend to relate through the symbolic language of appearances. The danger of course that we become the symbol instead of relating through the symbol.
As an intuitive rather than a sensory thinker, I’ve spent most of my life fighting the tyranny of appearances, simply because appearance in itself is a concrete, sensory phenomenon. The concrete quality of any thing cannot be an accurate revelation of the essence of that thing, as it is a particular feature, and not the whole of it. (I used to read a lot of Henri Bergson)”–Daniel Guy in the Desert

Only a substitute…

Something was once an onus in my life: masturbation.

When I was young, I always felt very guilty about touching myself even before I could cum. I had been taught and told that touching oneself was a grievous sin and in the category of sins next to murder. As a mormon, if you do masturbate, the only way to truly be forgiven is confess your sin to a bishop. Why they don’t schedule interviews on a weekly basis for young guys in the mormon church is beyond me. I would cry sometimes afterwards thinking of how awful and sinful I was. I would have nightmares about masturbating and the sex play that I had participated in with other boys when I was younger. Finally, around 16 I had a dream where I didn’t get into heaven and everyone knew that I was a sinner, and I decided that I had to go confess to the bishop.

What was one of the worst parts is that I had to make an appointment to speak with the bishop. Just to talk to him you had to go through a bunch of people, and it was in church, and you knew all of these people very well (think small town), and then there were people who were seeing him probably because of marital problems and other serious issues, etc. In any case, I made my appointment. I went in, and I confessed. It was actually one of the more difficult things I’ve ever had to do in my life. Mormons don’t have scheduled confessions, and it’s not like the catholic screen thing. In fact, I would think the bishop was very much wondering why I was coming to see him. Beyond that, no one talked about it except as a side topic in the big chastity lectures that were given, oh, probably every other week. No one admitted to it, and everyone always laughed as the subject came up. I was ashamed to say the least.

Following this agony, I was determined not to slip up again. I did about a year later, and I came running back to the bishop’s office wondering if I was going to be excommunicated which was a huge deal to me (and it would have been, and I had no idea how silly I was for thinking it). After that, I made it for five years without touching myself.

While I was on my mission, about 5 years later, I rubbed myself up against the bottom of a tub while I was taking a bath (like twice, trust me, I didn’t get that much out of it). As a result, I waited until the next time my companion was in the shower, and I called the mission president so that I could confess. He was somewhat irked. Oh well.

I didn’t really take the practice back up until I had decided that I didn’t really believe in the mormon church anymore. It was actually something I rather enjoyed at BYU thinking that I one of the few who got his rocks off while the rest were shamed with guilt or didn’t touch themselves at all.

As a result, I think masturbation has a taboo marker in my mind. And boy do I love it. However, I think that we still denigrate its practice. I listen to people say, oh, I wouldn’t need to do that, I just find my boyfriend, or things like that. I’m saying that I don’t think it’s just a substitute, and I think we should embrace it for the wonderful thing that it is regardless of whether one is in a relationship.

So be good to yourselves, and one last thought…

…so do you all write Proust-like sentences or more in the style of Hemingway?

Does anyone still use margarine?

…who isn’t vegan…yes, I’m talking to you Hanuman (at least I think you’re vegan)

When I was a kid, we never had margarine in the house. My parents believed it was bad. This was all based on some Udo Erasmus book that claimed that trans-fats caused cancer, and this was back in the mid-80’s. I would actually argue with other kid’s mothers that butter was healthier. I still never use it. I can almost always taste when anything is made with margarine, and it somehow is always very strange to me, and not usually in a good way.

Does anyone else feel this way?

This indulgence of butter was but a slim one. I remember being a kid and taking lunches to school. Mine consisted of pita bread with blended garbanzo beans and sprouts. Part of it was that we were poor, but how I wished I could just have a lunch with a drink box and a fruit-by-the-foot, instead of these bizarre sandwiches and concoctions.

I don’t think I have a preferred use for margarine at all. Now crisco, that’s another story…and not like in the way some people make sculptures of little girls out of butter.