Monday, February 22, 2010 | by nathan

A Little Pee Shy? Miss Coco’s Here To Help.

As a man, there are few things to me more upsetting than peeing in public. Ladies might have to endure the momentary, temporary pain of childbirth, but men? Men have to use urinals OUR WHOLE LIVES. You never feel so much like some kind of barnyard animal as when you’re standing in a public bathroom, in front of a porcelain fixture, trying to go. And when you’re at a sporting event – the long troughs at Oklahoma Memorial Stadium are especially cruel – it can be like torture. Especially when some dude you don’t know wants to talk to you, like, "Hey, did you see Bradford throw that 47-yard pass?" and all you can say is, "Yep!" The whole time your mind is spinning, praying you can squeeze out some little stream of pee lest the other guys realize that a mixture of stage fright and social anxiety disorder have stopped the whole works cold. Your body is begging, BEGGING you to pee, but your mind is like, IN FRONT OF THESE JAGS? I DON’T THINK SO.

…until you’ve been to a gay bar. Specifically, until you’ve been to the Copa in Oklahoma City. Now – I haven’t been there in a couple years, but back in my day there were swinging saloon doors opening more or less into the line for the bar. So even after you go inside you can still see all the patrons lining up for their swill vodka with diet tonics. Occasionally the bar line backed up into the bathroom; that was when you just learned to hold it. Sometimes a sweet girlfriend would invite you into the ladies’, but that was rare. So, into the mens’ you go. And crammed into a seven-by-two foot space are four urinals without dividers. You find yourself standing shoulder-to-shoulder, and almost every time something like this happens:

You could sorta be okay if you managed to get the urinal on the very, very end; then you at least could pretend the wall on your left was a divider and that things would eventually be Okay. But more often than not you were at one of the two middle ones. The walls in there were painted purple, and over the middle urinals there was a frame with some ads in there, because what else is one thinking about while peeing other than, "Gosh, I wonder who has the best limousine service in this city? And does anyone know of a good, gay-friendly plumber? AND IT’S POSSIBLE I MIGHT BE GETTING A DUI LATER – COULD SOMEONE WRITE DOWN THIS PHONE NUMBER FOR ME?" 

What I remember about standing at the Copa urinal is that I was usually standing there next to some giant drag queen or leather daddy, and in my most authoritative, deep-throated, mentally-ill sounding growl, repeatedly saying, "EYES FORWARD. EYES FORWARD." 

So now, peeing in public doesn’t really phase me. Not if I can just close my eyes, picture a purple wall and a limousine ad and think to myself, "If you can pee in the Copa, you can pee ANYWHERE." And it works every time.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s stories like this that won me Runner-Up for Best Writing in the Okie Blog Awards!

Heaux-Meaux, I Have A Story, It's Not Right But It's Okay, Writer, videos

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Thursday, November 12, 2009 | by nathan

…and BOOM goes the dynamite.

Get ready, this is a LONG ONE. With lots of dramatic CAPS LOCK. About POLITICS. And RELIGION. Because I’ve HAD IT.

(last chance. Please feel free to escape to a better website now).

So, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart under any circumstances whatsoever. I’ve explained some of my reasons for not shopping there, so I won’t elucidate them here. But here’s the thing – I don’t call what I’m doing a "boycott." I don’t church it up; I just don’t shop at Wal-Mart, and that’s the end of the story.

So it annoys me greatly to see that a Facebook group has sprung up encouraging people to "boycott" one of Oklahoma City’s best locally-owned places, Flip’s Wine Bar and Trattoria, for basically no reason whatsoever.

The story goes back to the unscrupulous firing of a gay teacher, Joe Quigley, from the Oklahoma City Public School system, and the failure of Gail Vines, an owner of Flip’s and a member of the Oklahoma City School Board, to vote to reinstate him once the Board was ordered to do so by a judge who found Mr. Quigley to have been wrongfully terminated.

Sorry if that was hard to follow; basically some of the gays are all up in arms because Gail didn’t vote the way they’d have liked. And normally I’m all about people putting their money where their mouths are and not patronizing businesses whose owners, staff, or policies violate some strongly-held belief or item of conscience. But seriously, you guys, Gail Vines is one of the least homophobic people on the planet. Her vote not to reinstate Mr. Quigley had categorically zero to do with him being gay; I can absolutely promise anyone that. I don’t know what the reasons were, but I don’t get the sense the boycotters do either.

To accuse Gail Vines of being a homophobe is sort of like accusing Orly Taitz of being sane, or the Jonas Brothers of being talented. Gail Vines goes to my church, Mayflower, which is literally the most liberal church in the entire state. Anyone with even remotely homophobic tendencies wouldn’t be comfortable there. To call this boycott a part of the great fight for GLBT equality is, to put it bluntly, bullshit.

Let’s boil it down: some group of people, in this case The Gays, saw a perceived slight and got all up in arms without having – or, let’s cut the crap, NEEDING - all of the facts.

It’s so typical of America today. One group or person does something that isn’t right in line with the beliefs or agenda of another group, and immediately, there go the alarm bells. Here comes the yelling. Here comes the faux outrage, wherein we get all mad and frothed up about something and then go back to our wonderful lives that are, at best, minimally impacted by the thing we’re all so pissed off about.

The worst part is, I think that when we do things like this we’re just playing to the Great Palace Lie that we ARE these labels that society, or, more to the point, The Advertising Industry, slaps on us. The Gays are a Group That Can Be Marketed To, and so – oh, you’re gay? Here’s a Britney Spears CD, some body glitter, a charge card from Hollister and a whole raft of political opinions you have to cling to without question. Please read from the script.

Oh, you’re a Christian? HOW INCREDIBLY GREAT FOR YOU. Here’s a chain of stores that sells unneeded crap made by underpaid workers in the Third World, and marketed just for you, an entire music industry to call your very own, for GOD’S SAKE YOUR VERY OWN CANDY TO EXPRESS YOUR FAITH, as IF candy could ever really do that, and an whole raft of political opinions you have to cling to without question. Please, just read from the script.

You guys, no one cares about helping you express anything about your truest identity. They’re taking your "identity" all the way to the bank. Britney Spears could give a crap about gay rights. For that matter, so could Bill O’Reilly. There’s money in what they’re doing, or else they wouldn’t be doing it.

We like to tout diversity in America. You know why? Because diversity allows us to divide ourselves up and to make doing so look really holy and just. We divide ourselves into easily-targeted groups for advertisers and politicians, and then we take offense when the people in the other marketing niches disagree with us or do things differently than we do.

Oh, and the people who think they flipped the system, who DON’T FIT INTO SOCIETY’S BOX, thankyouverymuch, with their ironic mustaches and thrift store t-shirts, oh, we’re the worst of all. I can tell you this from a zillion Flaming Lips concerts and outdoor music festivals where all the people loudly decrying the evils of corporate America sport identical uniforms of non-conformist clothing available at retail outlets near you, and they all have iPhones and went to suburban high schools and got to spend a year after college bumming around Europe on daddy’s dime.

Then the politicans, on both sides of the aisle, they line us up and yell at us that the people in the other marketing niches are DESTROYING AMERICA and are unrepentantly evil and must be, themselves, destroyed. It’s like America’s just one big cliquey high school, and we’re all sitting at different cafeteria tables, all looking exactly the same and thinking we are one and each as unique as snowflakes, and just SHOUTING at each other. HERE AND THEY’VE GOT ME DOING IT. BEHOLD MY CAPS LOCK KEY IN THE NAME OF UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE.

All of this is to say, this Flip’s boycott is yet another example of identity politics spinning wildly out of control. We are told that our stupid marketing niche – gay, or Christian, or Latino, or country, or urban, or whatever – defines who we are, and any perceived threat or insult to that identity must be met with swift and unyeilding resistance. We’ve turned into a nation of Sue Sylvesters; we shout as loud as we can until we get what we want, we play the aggrieved minority when it serves our purposes but could give half a flip about other aggrieved minorities when they get in our way. We claim our Constitutional rights are being trodden and compare ourselves to Martin Luther King, Jr., all in the name of getting to trod on someone else’s Constitutional rights. WE ALL DO IT.

To quote Tina Fey, "All God’s children are terrible."

So, what’s the point here? For me, the point is that I want us all to categorically refuse to play this game. I want us each to throw out the script, quit playing to type and stop being so ticked off about things we’re not willing to invest the time to understand outside the echo-chamber of pre-marketed media we know is just going to tell us what we want to hear. I’m losing my faith in America because I’m beginning to realize that we’re a country where the people who get what they want are the ones who yell the loudest. I’d like this to stop, but I’m under no idealistic assumption that it will. But I do refuse to play; it’s like Charlie Brown and the football – if you agree to play, you’ve already lost. I’m not going to argue about politics on the internet – who was it that said that’s like jerking off to your own photograph?

Things won’t ever get better as long as we’re organizing bullshit "boycotts" of people we don’t know for reasons we don’t really understand. But as I already said, I’m pretty much losing faith in the political system to make things better anyway. So here’s what I’m going to do instead: I’m going to go with my church to go feed the homeless every other Saturday from now until Jesus comes back, or until we as a nation decide that it’s entirely unacceptable that some people don’t have a place to live or enough food to live on. Because I used to think that, no matter our philosophies on governance, liberal or conservative or otherwise, there were some things we could all agree on, for instance, that it’s entirely unacceptable that some people don’t have a place to live or enough food to live on. I see now that isn’t true, and it breaks my heart.

There’s NOTHING we can all agree upon, nothing so sacred as to hold us in one accord, if someone, somewhere, can make money off of getting us to fight about it.

I’m going to give money to organizations I believe in. I’m not going to let anyone yell at me or call me names. I’m going to try my hardest not to yell or call anyone else names, either. I’m not going to join some random, ineffectual "boycott" for reasons I don’t understand against a woman who doesn’t deserve it because some overly-sensitive and under-informed members of my marketing group perceived some slight against us. And I’m going to try my hardest – and I’m going to fail, but that’s Okay too – to get up every morning, and go to bed every night, saying the only prayer there really is: "Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You. Thank You."

It's Not Right But It's Okay, Living In America, This I Believe

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Friday, August 28, 2009 | by nathan

I Can Go Anywhere

In a day marked with some sad local news, I also saw this on NPR.com:

 

""Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read," Grant says. "You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read."

The Rainbow was one of my favorite shows growing up, raised largely as I was on PBS. I think that what John Grant says in the story is true – learning how to read was nowhere near as exciting as the first time you picked up a book and were unable to put it down, then finding that once it was over you wanted to read it again and again and again.

 

Idiot Box, It's Not Right But It's Okay, library

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Saturday, August 8, 2009 | by nathan

Here’s Why Delta Can Suck It (Part 1)

Fair Warning: This post gets pretty foul-mouthed.

For the past month people have been asking me non-stop, "OH MY GOD SO HOW WAS IRELAND WAS IT SO AWESOME?"

And we gay out a little bit together while I tell them that yes, it was incredible, and so beautiful. I tell them how I cried when the plane landed in Dublin because it felt like coming home, like being reunited with a long-lost and much-beloved friend. I try to emphasize how great it is to show three of your favorite people around a country you love like it’s your own, to share with them little secrets that were shared with you way back in the day. I loved this trip.

But.

For some reason, I also bring up the flights. Those goddamn buggery bollocky flights, departing in Hell and arriving in Hell. I unleash a string of expletives so strong that it blows people’s hair back like a Memorex ad; to quote Jean Shepard, I "weave a tapestry of profanity." Because the flights? WERE A DISASTER.

That’s not entirely true; the international flights between JFK and Dublin were just fine. It was the rest of it, the stateside travel, that kept making me think that any second I would black out only to awake surrounded by dead bodies and holding an Uzi, standing there like River Tam, having just unconsciously slaughtered half an airport. The trip was incredible, life-changing and exactly what we all needed, but it was bookended by two days of absolute fail on the part of the airline industry.

Our itinerary was a little janky, because Brian was working in D.C., and we wanted to go for the Fourth, but I found a great deal on airfare out of JFK on Delta. I’ve been flying with Delta for well over a decade, have racked up several free tickets with them, and when I saw the chance to get an extra 6,500 SkyMiles by flying out of New York, I thought, "It’s so easy to get from D.C. to New York. We’ll just take the train; no problem."

So, I booked the following itinerary. Since Brian, Jayson and Laurie were already in D.C. when I got there, I booked the first leg to fly by myself from Oklahoma City to Atlanta, then on to Dulles, arriving about 10:30 p.m. Then, on the way back, Brian and I would arrive in JFK, then fly to Detroit, then on to Oklahoma City.

Then, a month after I booked the flights, Delta sent me an e-mail that our itinerary had been changed. Coming back, we would now be going from JFK to Detroit, then to Memphis, THEN to Oklahoma City. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I figured things like this happen – probably not enough people on that Detroit-OKC flight to justify actually having one, so they just moved everyone around. Only they gave us exactly 40 minutes in the Detroit airport to make the flight to Memphis.

I should have called them right then. I should have tried to eliminate that extra leg by having them send us through Atlanta, or Cincinnati, or hell, even Salt Lake City would have worked if they could get us home. But I didn’t; my unwavering faith that Things Will Always Work Out held fast and I thought, "We’re really going to have to run to make that plane, but what plane ever takes off on time? We’ll make it."

Ever the motherfucking optimist.

Also, let me just point out that if I had called Delta and REQUESTED this change, they’d have charged me $250. For each ticket. For a total of $500.

And so, the trip begins, sort of on a sour note. I had a crummy day at work, my housesitter never showed up (more on that in a sec), and by the time I got to the airport I was rubbed raw with stress. I walked up to the Delta kiosk to get my tickets.

YOUR ITINERARY WAS NOT FOUND.

Immediately the Neurosis Tabernacle Choir started singing in my head. In the two hours before I get on a plane and it is in the air, I am a total nervous wreck. I become obsessed with my driver’s license, my passport and my boarding pass, convinced either that I am going to lose one of these things, or that one of them will be somehow invalid and that I won’t be allowed on the plane. I have awful visions of myself handing my boarding pass to the gate agent and her saying, "Um, I’m sorry, but this is a McDonald’s receipt. You may not get on the plane." I become one hundred percent convinced that I am not going to be allowed to board. Then, once I am allowed on the plane, I become one hundred percent convinced that someone will be in my seat, someone big and angry, and I’ll be forced to get off, or that they’ll come down the aisle looking for me, saying, it turns out, we ran a background check. It seems your moral character is lacking; please get off the plane.

Once we are in the air, I can relax; no way they can kick me off now, right? WE’RE IN IT TOGETHER NOW, MOTHERFUCKERS.

And so of course when the machine won’t give me my ticket, Bad Mind kicks in. Bad Mind LIVES for this shit. You’re going to have to go home and miss Ireland altogether. It’s going to cost you thousands of dollars to get to D.C. now, and then you won’t have any money for the actual trip. You are fucked beyond all recognition.

The only thing I know to do to calm Bad Mind down is to pray, and so that’s what I did. I just closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and said, "Help."

When I opened my eyes, a surly Delta employee was walking up to me. "You on the Atlanta flight?" she asked with all the grace and sweetness of Lunchlady Doris.

I told her I was.

"You’re on a two-hour delay," she said, and began to walk away.

"Wait!" I called after her, frantically. She turned, begrudgingly, her eyes dull and impatient. "What do I do?" I asked.

From her reaction I thought she might have misheard me; she answered like you might answer a grown adult who asks, "What’s two plus two?"

"Go stand in the line," she said, her voice dripping with impatient derision.

My blood pressure now somewhere in the realm of a heart-diseased gorilla, I went to stand in line. When I got to the front I explained my predicament for the ticket agent. I may have led her to believe that my getting to Washington that evening was a life-or-death situation; without directly saying so, I may also have made it sound like I had urgent business there first thing in the morning. Maybe.

And so she pokes at her computer for awhile, trying to get me there. She finds a flight and then looks sideways at her computer, like a dog cocking its head upon seeing something unfamiliar. Then she looks at the gate agent at the computer next to her.

"I don’t know how to book this," she tells him.

"I don’t either," he says without taking his eyes off his own screen. "Ask Bill."

"Bill," my gate agent says to a man several feet away, at a volume guaranteed not to get his attention; she was using her inside voice in a crowded airport terminal. So of course Bill doesn’t move; he didn’t hear her. She waits. I wait. Another passenger comes around me to ask the gate agent a question, which she answers. Bill is talking to another Delta employee and doesn’t realize someone needs him, because the someone who needs him didn’t really bother with trying to get his attention.

The other passenger’s question is asinine, like, "Do I really have to check this GIGANTIC BAG? Can’t I just carry it on? Can’t you make an exception for cute little me?" 

I’m standing there about to just lose my shit all over the place. Finally the other passenger goes and gets in line like the rest of us plebians, and the girl stands back up and looks at me like, "What? Are you still here?"

"D.C.," I tell her again. "And I don’t care where I lay over or which airport I fly into. Dulles, Reagan, Baltimore, it’s all fine, just get me there."

She seems to rouse, as if from a nap, and pokes at the computer. "Oh yeah," she says. "Bill?"

BIll still doesn’t hear her.

"Hey Bill!" I say loudly. He turns to look at me. I point at my gate agent; Bill looks at me the way I look at people who go through the checkout lines at Target speaking loudly on their cell phones, and then drags himself, with great effort, over to my gate agent.

"I don’t know how to book it," the agent tells Bill.

"What is he wanting to do?"

I take umbrage at the use of the word wanting, as if I’ve made some outrageous request beyond the one I made when I purchased the ticket, which is GET ME WHERE THE FUCK I WANT TO GO. I take another deep breath, say another little prayerlet, and explain the situation to Bill with some urgency.

Bill roughly pushes the gate agent aside, hacks at the keyboard for awhile, and then steps away. By now the other gate agent is watching what the two of them are doing, saying, "Oh, yeah, I don’t know how to do this either." So I’m just holding up the whole line at this point; I can feel my fellow passengers staring daggers at me from the line.

Then someone else jumps around the line to ask Bill a question, can she take her cat on the plane? Bill steps away, leaving now two gate agents awaiting his expertise on the computer, and I hear the ENTIRE LINE behind me heave a huge Post Office sigh, an embattled groan.

Meanwhile, I’m standing there just staring at the lady who felt like she could just go around us all with her sob story, whatever the fuck it was, and make us all wait even longer BECAUSE SHE’S JUST THAT MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN WE ARE. I know, right? I’m looking at her with my meanest look, the one I used to give students when I would catch them surfing MySpace in the middle of lectures, like, "Seriously? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit right now?" She sees me looking at her and goes red; nobody knows how to throw shame like I do.

She goes to stand in line to check her cat. Bill looks around like, "What was I doing?" I stand up as tall as I can to get his attention. He looks at me like, "Oh God, are you still here?" and then comes back to the computer to finish fulfilling my outlandish request.

A few keystrokes and some words of training later, he has shown both gate agents how to book a flight, and I am handed a boarding pass for an American Airlines flight to Washington Dulles via Dallas. The other passengers on my ill-fated Atlanta flight watch me leave with great relief; I want to get on the airport P.A. and announce that if Delta wanted to take care of everyone faster, they could have Bill open up another line, as well as the Delta employee with whom he was talking before I flagged him down, and that they shouldn’t blame me. But I’ve got places to be; I go to board my American flight.

The flight goes as smoothly as an American Airlines flight can go, considering their chairs are so uncomfortable that it feels like their slogan should be "Fixing America’s posture, one traveler at a time." I get to Dallas and have to take their stupid Disney World Monorail all around the airport to my gate, the whole time standing next to a creepy-looking dude in a Promise Keepers ballcap who is staring intently at me the whole time. I’ve had such a bad day at this point that I’m thinking, "Just ask me if I’ve accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Just start that conversation with me and see how many of your teeth are still in your head at the end of it."

In the Dallas airport I call Brian and tell him that they shouldn’t plan to meet me at the airport, as I am now scheduled to arrive just a few minutes before midnight. I pay $7.99 for wi-fi and book a blue van to take me to my hotel.

The flight out of Dallas sits on the tarmac for quite awhile, and I don’t actually end up in D.C. until almost 1 a.m. When I start up my phone I have a text message from my mom:

I just went over to get Sam — he is doing great. I made him a bed in the kitchen and I think he’s asleep. Have fun! Luv mom.

A shock to me, since I was supposed to have a housesitter coming to stay with Sam all week. I feel a part of my brain collapse, like a Moon Bounce that’s been stabbed with a butcher knife, and I call Brian.

"Why does mom have Sam?"

"Oh, you heard about that, huh?" he says, his voice fearful.

It turns out that our poor housesitter, Jayson’s brother Casey, totaled his car that afternoon on the way over to my house, and won’t be able to watch the place after all. He’s fine, no major injuries, but his car is lost to the ages. Mom went and got Sam and he stayed with her all week, because my mom? You guys, she’s awesome; she kept Sam all week, and at the end of it he didn’t want to come home. I sent Facebook messages to the neighbors telling them that anyone entering the house is now doing so illegally.

At this point I am entirely convinced that the day can’t get any worse. So I go to meet my blue van, wanting just to be driven to my hotel and to climb into bed.

Only when I go to meet my blue van, there are seven people climbing into it. I walk up to the door and say, "Um, I reserved a seat on this." 

The last dude climbing into it, some preppy jagweed about my age, says, "It’s full," and slams the door in my face. The van takes off, without me. Had I not been weary with frustration at that point I may have dragged him out and kicked his face, but as it was I just walked back inside to the blue van counter, print my ticket at the kiosk and take it to the desk.

"My van filled up and left without me," I tell the guy at the desk.

"That was the last one for the night."

"I have a reservation," I say through clenched teeth.

He just shrugs, like, "and?"

"So get me a van," I say.

Once again it’s as if I’ve asked him for a lock of hair, or a kidney.

"Well I’ll have to call someone," he says irritably.

"So call ‘em."

He rolls his eyes at me, and I tap loudly on the counter. He picks up the phone, points to a row of seats and says, "Thirty minutes. Wait there." 

I glare at him suspiciously, pretty sure he’s just calling for a pizza, and sit down. Two minutes later he comes over and looks at me impatiently. "Your van is outside."

So, I go and load up my stuff. A few more people come and get in, also needing rides into D.C. The driver gets everyone’s destinations and creates a route; out of five people in the van, I will be dropped off fourth.

The guy sitting next to me gets on his cell phone and calls his girlfriend. I can hear both sides of the conversation; she is yelling at him, telling him that she’d woken up in their apartment all alone and was afraid.

"I’m sorry," he pleads, "my flight was delayed two hours." 

I can tell she is crying by this time. "You have to do better about getting home. You know I’m scared to be here alone at night. That’s why I’m glad to be getting married, because then I don’t have to, like, grow up and do stuff like be alone at night or pay bills. I woke up and you weren’t here and I was so scared."

She broke down in sobs while he apologized, over and over, for his delayed flight, as if he was personally responsible for that. If he hadn’t been such a pussy I would have thought it was nice that at least someone, somewhere in the world was apologizing for flight delays. I whiled away the drive listening to him apologize for the airplanes, for the ocean, for the air, for the fact that about half of every day it gets dark, and that she was scared of the dark and he wasn’t there to keep her from ever having to grow up, and like a really fucked-up Peter Pan and Wendy, they went on and on.

So the blue van winds through GWU and Georgetown and Capitol Heights before finally dropping me off. I’m exhausted and frustrated and at my absolute wits’ end. Brian meets me at the front door of the hotel and walks me up to the room; I’m so happy to see him that I give a moment’s thought to actually taking a physical bite out of his shoulder.

Jayson and Laurie have already been there a day, and so the room is fully stocked. The hotel is next door to a liquor store and there’s a bottle of Bacardi on the dresser next to some plastic cups. I take the bottle and fill a cup to the brim with rum, then down it one gulp.

"Babe, don’t," Brian says.

"You shut up," I snap. Jayson and Laurie have awoken by now and heard my story, and so I instruct the room: "We are not setting an alarm tomorrow. Must sleep."

Everyone’s in agreement with that, and so we all go to bed. I sleep like the dead, clinging to Brian like a life raft, having vague nightmares of horrible airline seats like something out of A Clockwork Orange, and blue vans that come to life and speed away with me holding the door handle, and Bill, an army of Bill, Bill legion stepping away to answer the questions of passengers who want to know if they can bring their cats on the plane, and me, in the middle of it all, pulling out huge chunks of hair that turn to snakes in my hand.

Part 2, NYC-OKC, coming soon.

It's Not Right But It's Okay, Living In America, On The Road

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Thursday, April 30, 2009 | by nathan

We Interrupt This Interruption

I’m back from my blogging break soon. Brian and I are celebrating our four-year anniversary today and spending the next few days at Black Mesa.

Still trying to figure out why I have a blog; don’t worry, I’m not deleting it or giving up or anything, just trying to figure out where it fits into the rest of my writing life. I’m writing new GCN columns and it’s some of the most challenging, rewarding and best writing of my life. In general I’m inspired lately; trying to make sure the blog gets its appropriate share of that without taking over.

And given that I’ve received no fewer than half a dozen requests to talk about the whole Miss California-Perez Hilton thing, I may have a go at it, though I have to say, I don’t have much nice to say about either Perez Hilton OR Miss California, so.

In the meantime, comedian Paul Scheer (you may know him as Donny the Head Page from 30 Rock) visited the Michael Jackson Auction and came back with photos that might make it hard for you to sleep for the next week or so. Click the photo for more because OH MY GOD.

Interweb, It's Not Right But It's Okay, Meta, Photos, iPod

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Tuesday, April 14, 2009 | by nathan

You Smell Awful

When I tell people about my gym they sometimes ask why I continue to go there. The short answer is that they have a pool and cheaper membership dues than most other places. The long answer is that I joined in May 2007, and then in April 2008 the gym’s ownership changed and I had to go under another one-year contract, which is now almost up, allowing me, as of the end of this month, to quit at a moment’s notice with no penalties. I’m just not sure I can handle another commitment right now.

Also, the people at my gym are not those too-attractive intimidatrons that populate most workout spaces, the people who look they’ve been carved out of cream cheese and likely spend all day on the treadmill. They’re older doctors and state legislators, mostly, with just enough ridiculously attractive people thrown in to keep me running maybe that extra mile when I want to quit but have no excuse to.

Some of the people, though, my God. There’s Inappropriate Talking Guy. ITG, for short, is about 60 years old and creepy, one of those people who corners total strangers and tells them his whole fucked-up life story about his alcoholic, abusive parents, a story that is somehow woven throughout with a fair dose of conspiracy theory and really jag-tastic sexual commentary. People get cornered in the locker room or on the tradmill by ITG and immediately get this look on their faces like they’re being drowned in their own bathtubs. I avoid him at all costs. Mostly he chooses to catch young 20-25 year-old girls on their machines and talk their ears off, all while leering at them so hard it looks like his eyes are going to pop out of his skull. Every time he comes anywhere near me I give him a threatening look; so far I have yet to be cornered.

ITG has a new habit as of this week. He seems to have purchased a new 13" MacBook, and he brings it up to the workout floor, sets it in one of those plexiglas holders normally used for propping up magazines and books, and proceeds to surf the internet while on the elliptical machine. It’s weird, but he’s not surfing porn, and he’s not talking to people, so I’m content just to peer over his shoulder and see what sites he’s reading. It’s mostly CNN.

Then there’s Perfume Lady. PL arrives about 45 minutes after I do and always takes her place on the arc trainer next to me. Her face is buried so deeply in layers of makeup that she looks like someone iced her, like a wedding cake. Her hair is always perfectly tressed out in a style one assumes is meant to resemble Dido circa 2000. In her mid-40s, she purchases her workout clothes at Victoria’s Secret. One imagines she’s, oh, I dunno, maybe a Federal Judge or a world-renowned neurosurgeon.

Perfume Lady wouldn’t even cross my radar – at 160 beats per minute my thoughts are more or less restricted to "HOLY GOD WHEN WILL THIS BE OVER." Also I’m constantly doing math in my head, figuring out to the third decimal point exactly what percentage of my workout I have completed. It’s really, really hard to do long division in your head at 160 BPM. Perfume Lady has raised my ire because, as her name implies, she bathes in cheap Walgreens-brand perfume (one assumes that no sane person would pay more than a few quid to smell that awful). The gallons and gallons of perfume are a strategic measure aimed at hiding the fact that the woman smokes probably 3-4 packs a day, a fact that is betrayed not only by her yellowed fingertips but also by the fact that perfume cannot cover up cigarette smoke.

So, Perfume Lady walks around in a cloud of stink, and every morning she climbs up on the arc trainer next to mine – for some reason, always next to me – and sets the difficulty to 5 (default is 15; I do 40). Her eyes search the room for potential soul mates, or possibly just men who lost their senses of smell in childhood accidents. Her cloud chokes me; being on the machine next to her feels like having my windpipe pinched ever so slightly. Every day I work out next to her I have a headache the entire rest of the day.

So what do I do? How do I handle Perfume Lady without being a total douche? I could move machines, but see, there are only 3 arc trainers in the whole gym, and by the time she comes along I’ve usually been on the thing for 30-40 minutes and have got myself into a rhythm. The math problems are coming easier, Matt Lauer is on the TVs, moving is just not really that simple. Anyway, the furthest away I could get would be to put one empty machine between us, and the cloud is not small. This morning was particularly awful, and every time I closed my eyes I imagined myself reaching over and slapping her right off the machine and onto the ground, screaming "OH MY GOD DO YOU KNOW HOW BADLY YOU SMELL? YOU ARE CHOKING ME TO DEATH, LADY."

But I don’t. Not sure what to do, but it’s not that. In the meantime I’m going to take some sinus medication.

Health, It's Not Right But It's Okay

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Friday, March 13, 2009 | by nathan

The Last Week of Winter

It just occurred to me, on this second Friday the 13th of 2009, that there is only one week left in winter. A week from day is the spring equinox, signaling with its equal amounts of daylight and night that winter has finally packed its toys and gone home. Of course, you wouldn’t know it from the weather here – it’s cold and raining and generally S.A.D. weather. It always helps me to keep in the front of my mind that my feeling of hopelessness is a chemical thing, molecules in my brain doing their thing in the lack of sunlight and warmth. That means that my intuition isn’t telling me it’s the end of the world, that the economy might not be on the brink of collapse and that I shouldn’t, in fact, buy a gun and double my tomato crop.

Last night after work I went home to let Sam out before going to the gym. When I called him he went under the dining room table, through the legs of a chair he really couldn’t fit through. This was the same chair on which I’d stacked a bunch of dress shirts I need to iron. The chair went over on the floor, and Sam, confused, proceeded to walk all over them.

"Oh, Sam, god dammit!" I cried. My poor, submissive dog got scared at my tone and wouldn’t go outside, retreating instead into the office. I called him again and he held his ground on the couch in the office. I told him about three times to go out, getting more and more frustrated as I’d hoped this stop at home would only last a couple minutes. Sam hopped down from the couch and stood, defensively, in the middle of my office and peed ALL OVER THE FLOOR.

…and I completely lost my shit all over the place.

I started crying, shouting sort of to no one in particular that that office was supposed to be the place where I was going to make my dreams of becoming a writer come true, and what is it now? A pee-soaked indoor doghouse with a desk covered in dust and bills and where no writing has taken place in months, as I’ve been doing my daily writing during the lunch hour and after hours at work. It doesn’t help that these winter blues mean that I’m losing faith in my creative abilities, such as they are, and that the novel I’m writing seems like utter crap to me every time I open it up but I can’t give up now, dammit, because I’m almost 50,000 words in and the story is nowhere near over.

So I cleaned up the pee, petted Sam for awhile and finally got him to go outside and finish the business he’d started on the hardwood, and called Brian, who was at that moment driving back from Austin, only about 45 minutes from home, and lost my shit again to him over the phone. It had been a terrible day, wherein I’d argued loudly with an Oklahoma City police officer and didn’t feel well to begin with and thought WAY TOO MUCH about the economy, and I felt more defeated than I have in a long, long time.

I felt terrible about going to the gym when Brian was so close to getting home, but I needed to move, to work out some of this aggressive energy that had been building up. I did, and I felt better almost the moment I sat down at the chest press. I came home and watched television with my husband and generally felt better.

This morning I was feeling nervous and anxious once more, however, and so I decided to put on my coat and scarf and take a quick jaunt around the building, my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. I was walking past a group of undergraduates when all of a sudden – I’m not sure at all what happened – the zipper on my jeans just popped right open, right there in front of them. There was a moment of embarassed silence and fear. In spite of it all I had to work to suppress a laugh while I hitched my zipper back up, then, laughing at myself, I turned and walked back to the office.

Is everything okay? No, not at all. But it’s all mostly brain chemistry stuff and winter stuff and the only way I know to get through those kinds of things is the way I’m choosing to: laughing at myself, getting enough exercise, eating well and trying to remember that this, too, shall pass.

Everyday, It's Not Right But It's Okay, Sam, This I Believe, Writer

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Monday, March 2, 2009 | by nathan

Dude, Who S*** In Their Wheaties?

This ad appeared on page 11A in yesterday’s Sunday Oklahoman: 

Here are closeups of the individual pieces: 

Anyone got an explanation? 

At any rate, I’m fascinated by the ongoing story of newspapers’ demise, exemplified in the story about how the New York Times could save hundreds of millions of dollars by suspending paper printing and sending every subscriber a free Kindle, and also by the shutdown of the Rocky Mountain News, which took me totally by surprise. Is this just more evidence of that – is the Oke trying to stop the bleeding of fleeding advertisers, or was there some kind of lame attempt on KOKH’s part to make a national story local – like "IS THE OKLAHOMAN GOING UNDER TUNE IN AT NINE TO FIND OUT." I’m dying to know the story behind this, because really the only word I can think of to describe this ad copy is "bitchy." 

UPDATE: Mystery solved? (via @jonfisher)

UPDATE 2: The Lost Ogle picked up the story AND used my photo! The Lost Ogle rocks. Thanks, Patrick!

It's Not Right But It's Okay, Oklahoma

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009 | by nathan

The Neighbor

I realized recently that I was, in fact, not in good hands with Allstate. Okay, fine, I’m not here to impugn the quality of the Hands, but the fact is those Hands were costing me about a half a bill more a month than almost everyone I know. This after the fact that for the last three or four years – basically since I realized at one point that if anything happened to my car I’d be oh so fucked zOMG because there’s no replacing my car, there’s having the car I have and not having a car – I drive like an old lady. I go the speed limit, I always buckle up, and while I do have stored within my body roughly the amount of road rage that’s present on, say, the Triborough Bridge at any given moment, I haven’t had a ticket in over three years. And that ticket was a seat belt citation. I honestly could not tell you the last time I got pulled over for speeding.

And yet – here I am paying half again for car insurance what everyone else I know is. File under, Chump.

Brian has a friend who’s an insurance agent, and today he called him for me. The guy quoted me a more reasonable price for car insurance but also mentioned to Brian that, should, say our house burn down (not entirely unthinkable since our house was built in 1941, we live next to this, and this occasionally happens in our neighborhood, and oh yeah, all those tornadoes Oklahoma’s famous for), nothing of mine would be covered. So our wonderful insurance agent suggested I get a renters’ policy to cover me in the event of a disaster.

So fine, I did it. I’m still saving about $50 a month AND I have an insurance agent I actually trust for once. So that’s a plus. But it went all over me – a renter in my own home.

Do you know who doesn’t have to be a renter in their own home? Straight married couples, that’s who. If Brian and I were legally married, crap like this wouldn’t matter. We could visit each other in the hospital without having to spend thousands on legal fees drawing up paperwork saying we can visit each other in the hospital. If one of us died the whole insurance and inheritance thing would be much, much easier than it is now – we have to pay the aforementioned legal fees and do mountains of paperwork just to loosely codify something that married people get the instant their marriage license is filed. Legally, we’re strangers.

I wish that the people who oppose gay marriage could understand the way I’m feeling right now. It’s a rancid stew of so many negative emotions, of unwantedness and exclusion and passive aggression and not being a fully included or valued member of my society. I’m a renter in my own freaking house. I wonder what Jesus would say about that. I wonder if that’s a metaphor for the larger situation. I wonder if people who have such strong opposing views to mine would take a moment and try to see this from my point of view, for just a second. At the very least I hope you’ll hold back and understand I’m hurting enough. Maybe now’s not the time to pile on with your little opinions about something you don’t know anything about.

Whatever, man. I really hate playing the aggrieved minority. But I have to say that if you’re straight – especially if you’re married – you have it so easy and you don’t even know it. It’s like being rich that way – it’s hard to understand how much easier your life is unless you’re on the outside. And here we are living next door to you or down the street or hiding within your families and churches and feeling invisible and left out and unwanted. So you should think real hard about that and wonder if that’s the witness you want.

Heaux-Meaux, It's Not Right But It's Okay, Living In America, This I Believe

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Tuesday, February 17, 2009 | by nathan

Come On Baby, Let’s Get Away. Let’s Save Our Troubles For Another Day.

Sweet Fancy Moses has it been a hectic couple-a weeks. For starters, Brian’s company raced inexorably toward their year’s biggest deadline. When people ask me what my husband does for a living, I tell them, "He makes the internet happen," which is almost unequivocally answered with the question, "WHO DOES HE THINK HE IS, AL GORE?" This, in turn, is followed by a loud laugh from the person making the joke and a blank, flat, dead-eyed stare from me.

So that happened. I’ve been dealing with a difficult situation in my life, one that has ruined my mood even on days when it was far away, and one which I’m handling but not with as much grace as I’d like. In addition I realized recently that someone from high school blocked me on Facebook, which doesn’t really bother me as it does just strike me as remarkably lame and passive-aggressive, but it’s okay, because if you’re reading this, which I’m sure you’re not, all I can say is, wow, you really showed me.

I think I can chalk all this rambly difficulty up to the fact that it’s February, which is my second-least favorite month of the year behind August. It would be my least favorite month except for the fact that it’s so mercifully short. It’s February every year when I decide that winter is not going to relent this time, that it’ll be cold and dark forever and that we’re all going to die soon. All of which would be true, except that I have a teaspoon of hope about Obama and the stimulus package, and I just designed next month’s banner for this website and I think it’s my best one yet. Also, in addition to two plane tickets from JFK to Dublin, I am also now the proud holder of a hotel room for the Fourth of July weekend in Washington, D.C. and, soon, a set of plane tickets that will get me all these fabulous places we’re going over the summer.

But it’s not enough that we’re planning to spend a week away from our lives and our country in July, because somehow we have ended up with tickets to see David Wilcox in Dallas over the last weekend in March. I can’t say for sure of course, but I’m reasonably certain that my life would be completely different if, on a random road trip over Martin Luther King weekend in 2000, my friend Tish hadn’t introduced me to David Wilcox. I’m pretty sure it would be very, very different. He and his music have had a profound impact on the person I’ve become in a way that not many artists have, and yet I’ve never seen him live. In addition to smiling like an idiot on LSD throughout the whole show, I also am considering knocking on every door in our hotel to see if he’s staying there, as the people who own it also seem to own the space where David will be performing.

As ever, we’ll be staying here:

Because, no matter how many times we go to Dallas we never get sick of lounging by their kickass pool. This year I’m going to try a Cucumber Collins or a blood orange martini and be nice and calm and relaxed and secreted away from all that currently stresses/bums me.

Prospects for future travel include a possible weekend at the Price Tower in Bartlesville, though that’s more of a work-type thing as I’m considering it for my current article series, and there’s a "literary" conference going on in Tulsa in April that I’m considering attending. I will tell you, though, that no matter where or when we get away, that once Daylight Savings time arrives (is over? I never know) that you will find a much calmer, more relaxed and well-adjusted person who will have miraculously survived his 29th February without shooting up a post office, and for no other reason than that, I deserve that damn drink.

It's Not Right But It's Okay, On The Road, iPod

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