Occasional Jots and Tittles

There was a time when very little got past me.

I’m not sure when that time was, any more, but the change got past me, and a lot more since (apparently). My best guess is that as we hit our 30’s and 40’s, our brains just stop accumulating a lot of the smaller detail that fills our memories when we’re younger. For one thing, I guess there’s less room for it – or at least, adding too much more makes the brain’s index just too cumbersome to navigate the memories.

And interests change. So whereas 20 years ago, I’d still would know maybe 3 out of 4 of the top 40 pop artists, today I probably couldn’t recognize the names of 3 out of 4. Of the rest, I might have heard the name but wouldn’t recognize a picture. Or a song title. I’ve almost certainly never heard the songs.

Heck, at one time I could tell you if there was anyone new who’d shown up this week at the gay dance club in town. Today, not having been in at least five years, probably closer to 8 or 9, I probably couldn’t identify ten people there. I barely notice when someone new moves in on my block, and if the move happens in my busy season at work, I probably won’t know it for months.

You’d think, though, that I could keep track of who connects to my blog. Only a couple of friends are regular commenters (thank you, Mick and Brett) but I know that there are at least a few others who read it, based on the logs for the webserver–after filtering out the indexers and so forth. Apparently, there are gadgets you can install in Wordpress which will show you where the traffic to your blog comes from, and even (if you want) display that as part of your website.

I noticed this on Tony’s “West of Mayberry” blog recently–the most recent ten “hits” to his blog are listed, along with the (approximate) location of the viewer — in my case, my “hit” shows correctly as “Baton Rouge, Louisiana”. More interestingly, I noticed that it shows I arrived at his page from my own blog (because I use my blog’s links as a way to catch up on the others I read most often). Cool feature – I may have to include that somehow on mine.

But what really bowled me over is that I hadn’t noticed Tony’s updated blogroll. On his previous blog, he’d listed the blogs he reads most often on his “Large List”, and a longer list below of others he looked at as “Rolling Along”… neither of which included mine. Which I understood, because lord knows, I’m not that diligent about posts. I didn’t comment much on his old blog, either, at least not in comparison with his recent, revised edition.

Now, however, on the Mayberry blog, there I am: right on the list under Brettcajun (which, if anyone knows the history between Brett and me, is totally appropriate). I’m flattered that he noticed the posts I’ve made there, enough to come at least check out what little I have to say here. It makes me glad I still notice some things.

A friend has a tag for posts he calls “snarky”, which I translate roughly to mean “OK, I’m being a little bit of an ass here, but you can see it’s deserved.” You can imagine, in dealing with people in general and with gay people in particular, it could be very useful. I’m adding it as a category here.

So I’m online the other day, on Gay-Oriented-Service-1, and I see a profile for someone I remember from Gay-Oriented-Service-2. Part of me was a little hesitant about contacting him, because I’d eventually deleted him from my friend list at Service-2, but I couldn’t remember exactly why. I did remember, though, that he enjoys big pickup trucks. We have an F250 Crew Cab (Powerstroke Diesel) so they don’t get a lot bigger, and I figured it would at least give us something to chat about. Bad move.

As I soon remembered, one of his huge fetishes is getting a truck like that stuck in mud. I mean axle-deep, spinning till you’re almost buried, stuck. Odd fetish, but I’m not one to judge, as long as nobody gets hurt, right? I just figure it’s not something we’d want to go do on purpose, as the truck weighs about 9,000 lbs and isn’t easy to tow out of a “stuck deep” situation.

So I told him no, I wasn’t interested in getting the truck stuck in the mud for him, so as to not incur a towing charge. No problem, he says – I’d pull you out, you wouldn’t need to pay anything!

Mind you, he’s in Houston, 4 or 5 hours away. What am I supposed to do in the meantime? (Don’t answer that; I already know what his answer would be, and it would add an interior detailing job to the tab.) No, I said… I’m not going to do that.

Let me call you and talk with you about it, he says. Now, I know what that means, and you know what that means. You don’t call someone to discuss a fetish, when that person has the object of your dreams and doesn’t want to let you use it the way you want, unless you’re going to (A) try to talk him into it, or (B) get off online talking about it, or (C) both. None of which interested me. Struggling to be polite, I told him so, point blank, because I was getting a little tired of this whole line of discussion. And here’s the response I got for my trouble:

you fucking little inbred white trash LA coon ass….I’ve been wanting cuss your little nellie ass out your fucking QUEEN worthless piece of FUCKING white trash or whatever the fuck you are, I’ve never met anyone from LA that was worth a fucking piece of shit, so why don’t you go fuck yourself you piece of faggot shit!! I put you on ignore…haah your screen name almost reads cowboy in bra is more like it !!!! FUCK YOU!

No good deed goes unpunished, it seems. But at least this way, once I blocked him on Service-1, I made a note to block him wherever I saw him. Still, you have to wonder about someone who can come that unhinged over a simple turn down – and hope he doesn’t have access to firearms.

My friend Reddy recently had a posting in his blog asking for questions to answer for his ongoing “The Truth” series… where he answers a question, deep and personal though it may be, with the truth. This time the question was:

If you could change being gay…….would you? If not, was there a point in time when you started being OK with it, or have you always been OK with it?

An interesting, multi-part question. For me, the simple answer to the first part is “No”, and the simple answer to the second part is “not long after I figured it out”.

The more complex answer to the first part kind of builds on Reddy’s answer, that if that one part of his life changed, there would be cascading effects throughout. The biggest change, of course, would be that I’d have an entirely different set of friends, an entirely different set of hobbies, and an entirely different social life.

Many of you know that for several years, I competed in gay rodeos, wrestling steers and other assorted fun tasks. I didn’t start until my mid 30’s, by which time most straight rodeo competitors have long since hung up their hats and retired. But gay rodeo encourages contestants to continue (in part because the events have modified rules that are less strenuous than pro rodeo) into middle age and up. As a result, I met some of the closest friends I’ve got through a sport I would never have entered as a straight person.

Likewise with my leather & BDSM interests. Yeah, I know, there are straight kinky people out there. But by and large, they aren’t social and visible like gay men are. Most of the friends I have who aren’t rodeo friends are leather friends, and together the two groups form most of my social life.

Rodeo also reawakened my interest in travel. In the 1990’s, I took a few trips with family and friends, but I didn’t travel alone much. Driving more than an hour or so alone made me nervous, and flying wasn’t much better, since I didn’t like to rent a car on the other end. Rodeo’s full of folks who are happy to share rides to/from the airport, to the arenas, and even to book the same flight as you so you have someone to travel with. Eventually, travelling together gave me the confidence to travel alone, including a solo drive all the way to Wichita, Kansas one year to compete in rodeo finals.

I can’t imagine my life without the people who are in it today, as well as the ones whom I’ve lost over the years. If I were straight, I’d probably have long since married, settled down with a few kids, and like my sisters, I’d have no social life that doesn’t involve putting the kids into car safety seats and heading to McDonalds.

So no, I wouldn’t change being gay. The drawbacks are few and minor, and the things I’d lose would be irreplaceable.

As for when I was okay with it… well, I’m a basically logical person. Once I realized this was me, I ran through the options in my head. Even then, in 1979, I knew that there was no accepted means of “fixing” gay people, and that science was rapidly coming to a consensus that this was an inherent trait that could not be changed, whether it was genetic or environmental. It was like being left-handed; attempts to force a change almost always resulted in problems. So I decided that if it couldn’t be changed, it had to be accepted, and deal with it the best I could. So… I did. Kind of uneventful, I know. But that’s me.