childhood trauma content ahead!

I’ve never shit my pants. Actually, that’s not true at all. A much more accurate way to say that would be to say that I used to shit my pants all the time. As a kid, I tended to not wipe as thoroughly as I could have and the results were lots of hastily wadded up and hidden streaky underpants. That’s not exactly ‘shitting you pants’ per se, but the general results: shit particles on your underpants, were the same.

I can actually only think of twice that I’ve actually dropped a dump in my pants, if we’re being completely honest. Once was when I was over at Eric Bachewicz’s house. It was winter and snowing and we were out ‘skitching’ which was essentially hiding between parked cars and then running out and grabbing onto the bumper of a passing car and letting the car pull you through the snow. This was an entirely stupid pastime, and it really didn’t work that well, but that didn’t stop us. We were out there with a dude named Norman and his brother who was named Rayhan. These guys were, uh…they were eastern Euros of some sort, maybe serbs (?), and they didn’t really like me that much. They were kind of bullies.

Norman and Rayhan were friends with Eric, and so was I so we tolerated each other (well, that’s not really a fair way to categorize the relationship. Realistically, they thought I was some kind of total fag and I pretty much just prayed they wouldn’t attack me [which actually goes a long way towards proving my ‘total fagdom,’ if I’m really examining the whole thing with unprejudiced eyes]). We’d all hang out and I, as the kind of outsider/loser of the squad, would foolishly try to do the ballsiest things I could think of to win the respect of these two guys who are probably both janitors now (not that I have a job of any kind. Just sayin).

This included hanging out and skitching even though I was feeling sick. SO, as a particularly slow moving car headed down Wellington ave. I came out from between the cars and grabbed the bumper. Now, skitching, as you may have guessed, doesn’t hardly work at all. When I grabbed the bumper, the only thing that happened was that I fell forward pretty violently and shit my pants with a savage ferocity that can only be summed up as “Totally Gross”. I went back to Eric’s house and scooped the bright orange goopy crap out of my underwear and off my legs. The shit had come out in spray form, not unlike the way that pink goo shot out of the dudes’ hoses in Ghostbusters 2, and it had done a pretty good number on my drawers, my pants and even my socks(!) and it also smelled kind of gnarly (if you can believe it!) I wrapped my ruined underwear in toilet paper and explained to Eric’s mom that shit wasn’t going so well and I was gonna just go home. Then I went outside and threw my underwear away in the dumpster (keep in mind it was FREEZING! And I was wearing wet [because of poo] pants), endured a little open mockery from Norman Rayhan and Eric and then went home and promptly took a hot bath. That sucked. The other time I shit my pants was way better.

My mom had this boyfriend who was a real asshole. His name was Michael Gratz. Michael Gratz had a son named Michael Gratz jr. and the day we met (me and the son) he called me a fag (this was obviously a common theme in my childhood) because I liked Michael Jackson. I was probably 7. I could not fathom how someone could not like Michael Jackson, much less think that his fans were fags. This kid was uh…probably ten or eleven, just by the way. He thought Michael Jackson and all his fans were fags. That’s pretty advanced, right? Anyway, I aksed him what music he liked, as I was so completely blown away by his opinion, and his response: John Waite and his classic jam (which was, at the time a current hit) Missing You. Now, if I can editorialize for a second, there’s nothing cool about being reductive and using the word “fag” in any sort of context, but seriously, the gayness of John Waite and Missing You cannot be overstated. Michael Jackson and Beat It are fucking Burt Reynolds eating a tiger raw compared to John Waite, bro. No two ways about it.

Anyhoo, we (me, my mom, and the two Michael Gratz’s) were going on a road trip from St. Louis (where I lived as a wee one) to Nantucket (where Michael Gratz had a summer home that he visited about twice a year). This was a horrifying prospect for me because while Michael gratz Jr. made no secret of openly hating me, his dad was more treacherous, threatening me and shaking me and shit when my mom would leave the room. The whole thing kind of sucked, and though I had a great time in Nantucket, I was always on edge, and I was constantly under attack by this father son team that really, for whatever reason, hated my faggy guts.

I remember that the house out there reminded me at the time of the house in Weekend At Bernies and I also remember that I got my favorite shirt from my childhood out there (it was a fish skeleton) and here’s the other thing I remember:

Michael Gratz yelling at me and Michael Gratz junior constantly punching me and me waiting, biding my time until the last day we were there. See, I hated these guys a lot, and I may have been a faggy cockblocker (a sentiment so personally revolting that I can barely handle it, but realistically, that’s why dude didn’t like me, right? He was trying to bang my mom and I was often in the way…ew. Ew. Ew. I, like all humans, like to imagine that my mom has no genitals and was impregnated in a lab) but I was also an intelligent and highly revenge motivated little boy. I KNEW that they only came to this house twice a year (when we showed up, the amount of getting shit together so we could function in the house betrayed that it had been a LONG time since anyone had been there) and I figured that I could pull a highly subversive move pretty easily if I just waited for my moment.

So, on the last day we were there, we’d packed our bags and everything, we were leaving and all in the car. I ran back into the house under the guise of going to the bathroom, which I kind of did. I shit in my pants. On purpose. I shit into my underwear, took off my shitty underwear and hid the shitty underwear in the vent of the room that I’d shared with Michael Gratz Jr. I knew it would be a bare minimum of six months before anyone found that dumpy load, and I was pretty proud of my little plan.

I rode all the way back to St. Louis with no underwear on, and it was worth it. It was great. This is also a story I’ve never really told anyone before, and if it wasn’t for the big bottle of Jim Beam on the table at the JBTV staff meeting (and my resulting hangover) I probably wouldn’t have told it right now. But, yeah. I’ve got lots and lots of great stories like this, folks. Lots.

Good morning

Love ya, Black. Always a pleasure.

Why divorce happens: a completely definitive guide

So many marriages these days end in divorce. Unrealistic conservatives call it an epidemic of massive proportions and point to things like pornography and the Simpsons as purveyors of a wanton, new, consequence-free social paradigm that’s quickly shuffling us all towards Gomorrah, while selfish babies point to everything from the animal kingdom to life extending medication to the lessons of our parents to justify why divorce ain’t a big deal. I’m not trying to come down on either side here, because frankly, they’re both wrong, and as we discussed yesterday, real issues are rarely able to be reduced to a simple two sided argument. I know all about why people are getting divorced. I live inside a marriage and I’ve discovered the place where the water first trickles through before the dam bursts. I KNOW where divorce comes from and I’m gonna share it with you.

Now, before you read into this too much, I don’t think my marriage is gonna end in divorce (It’s much more likely to end with my wife just running out for a pack of smokes and never coming back, which is a whole different thing). Lots of marriages don’t, but some do. Lots do, and here’s why:

When you first see that special dude or lady that you someday end up convincing to try some form of unnatural sex which eventually results in enough guilt and weirdness to ultimately lead to a marriage proposal, there tends to be some form of energy there. Some couples report hating each other upon first meeting, while others claim to instantly have recognized true love while still others (and I’m guessing this is about 95% of everyone) just become overwhelmed with the urge to bone the bejezus out of one another. This is the category I fell into (and still find myself in, hence the constant pestering, a decade later).

So, you’re there with this potential life/boning partner and you manage to not fuck it up. You end up with each other’s phone numbers, you guys decide to go out, maybe you bang or immediately exchange oral sex in the back stall at the Dennys that you’re in and things are starting to go well. You get this reasonable idea that you’re at least semi palatable to this other person. So what happens next?

You hide yourself away as much as humanly possible, that’s what happens next. You don’t want him knowing about your hairy ass, so you get it waxed. You brush your teeth before you see her, you pretend you’re not outraged by people saying that Jedi is the best of the original trilogy, you douche, you hold in your farts with the desperation of someone hiding under the bed from a death squad holding in a sneeze, you never, ever shit. You’d rather DIE than shit. You pretend to like her weird tits and dipshit friends, you pretend that you’re fine with licking balls. You act like this weird sex position that you’re constantly finding yourself in is something you don’t find to be degrading/painful/ridiculously laughable. You show up on time, you pay for things. You pretend to be employed. You laugh at shit that you’d otherwise openly mock. You agree with things you strongly disagree with. You wear panties that match your bra that match your shoes (because that’s gonna be all you’re planning on wearing at some point in the evening) that matches your dress. You check your teeth. You actually wash your hands after you piss. You shower. You pretend you don't ever think about banging his/her friends. You clean up your filthy, disgusting room.

(ed note: in every relationship I’ve ever been in, this last item has actually never materialized. From the most casual all the way up to my wife, I’ve never cleaned my room for a girl, nor has anyone ever cleaned their room for me. American, Midwestern white women between the ages of fourteen and twenty five have to be the sloppiest, messiest human beings on the planet. Followed closely by me. Just sayin.)

So here you are: you’ve got this person that makes you happy and all you have to do to make them happy in return is completely hide almost everything about yourself. Meanwhile, they’re doing the same exact thing (though you don’t ever realize that. You think they like the way you twist their tits when you’re fucking them and that they really always keep their balls shaved, or that they don’t find your eating habits to be gross). It’s a happy and exciting house of cards, marked by lots of work and lots of boning as a reward for said work. These are the good times, right? So why not kick it up a notch?

You move in together/get married. These can be interchangeable, because for one thing, lots of divorces are avoided by people living together and then breaking up, and for another thing, lots of people live together forever and never get married. The general notion of what happens next, however, is the same. And it’s this:

Suddenly, that person that was the one person on earth that you never ever wanted to fart in front of becomes the one person that ends up smelling ALL your farts. They’ve gone from being the person that you think doesn’t shit to the person that doesn’t light the match or spray the spray. They wake up in the morning and they’re grumpy, or you’re grumpy. They’re standing right there so it’s not maintaining any sort of illusion to shave your back right in front of them. May as well let it go. He’s right there, and he knows that I haven’t had my asshole waxed for a while, it’s not like he’s gonna be upset if it’s still not waxed tonight when we go out. This is in stark contrast to when these things used to be priorities. Now, they’re expendable and seemingly pointless time wasters; smoke and mirrors that are only being put up for someone who’s in on the trick. What’s the point?

Well, do you know the physics behind a house of cards? Because if you take one card out, the whole thing collapses. Suddenly, she’s not getting the smooth-backed gentleman that she thought she had purchased. She’s, however subtly or unconsciously, realized that the masks are falling. A decision is made (again, perhaps subconsciously) that she’s not putting your balls in her mouth any more. She doesn’t like it, and it seems like we’re getting rid of the inconvenient things in this relationship, right? And Balls-mouth is certainly inconvenient.

Well, no balls in the mouth means no more pretending I like your cunty best friend or all these stupid pillows. Well, you don’t like my pillows? I hate your action figures/beer posters/neon signs/band/stench. My stench! Don’t you dare deride my stench! How bout this: I’m not really a dentist! I actually just sell asprin to old people at the nursing home and tell them it’s heart medicine and I charge six hundred bucks a pill! How bout that?!

And it goes on and on and on like this.

You see how this can quickly lead to people bolting from each other, regrouping alone, douching, shaving their backs, pretending to always wear clean underwear, and then fucking it all up again with someone new, can’t you?

Sure you can. You’re not idiots, right? Of course not. Anyhoo, if you find that this is what’s happening to your marriage/LTR, well, there’s one foolproof way to fix it right up: Have kids. It’ll have you guys waxing each other’s assholes and back in matching underwear faster than you can say “Dinosaur Train.” Seriously, it’s foolproof.

Okay, speaking of, this baby is upset. Gotta go.

We'd better get moving if we want to stay ahead of the weather

Good afternoon! Today is the darkest, most brutal storm of the century here in Chicago. They say that this storm is gonna have more of some kind of barometric pressure than the one that sank the old Edmund Fitzgerald all those years ago and subsequently gave birth to that terrible Gordon Lightfoot song (ed. Note: does it seem strange to anyone else that ‘lightfoot’ is recognized by my spellcheck [but in a SHOCKING twist ‘spellcheck’ is not!] Seems like someone over at the software-making place has some highly dynamic taste in shitty music).

Well, I’m in the thick of it right now. I’m watching some trees whip around and checking out some dude bringing kegs into a bar. Seems downright terrifying out there. I mean, fuck. The traffic cones are threatening to blow over. There are clouds covering almost half the sky! OOOOOOOOH. I battened down the hatches at my house for this shit, people. Took in all the shit off my porch, boarded up the windows, got some whiskey and some toilet paper and some drinking water and the last coke on earth and buried it in an underground bunker and for what? The Edmund Fitzgerald was obviously a total pussy of a boat. There. I said it. I mean, I wouldn’t want to be walking around all elderly and wearing a sail right by the highway or anything, but I’m hardly terrified by the weather today.

Frankly, it’s a bunch of hooey; the climactic equivalent of the 24 hour punditry that derails important news and makes (for example) some Yosimite Sam looking Koran burning hick, or a rehabbed Burlington coat factory a front page story. The weather people finally got their own Terry Jones in this storm with the catchy trappings of a famous boat and song and the thrills of almost unheard of barometric readings (hold onto your seats!) and they’re off! Only problem is that shit’s not all that devastating and well…the whole thing is easily debunked by, you know, looking out the window.

This kind of sensationalism, however, gets harder when you’re talking about things that you can’t just walk outside and stand in, like say, when people started saying that getting your kids vaccinated would lead to autism. Never mind that on one side was the whole medical community, doctors, nurses, researchers: you know, the people who know what the fuck is going on, saying things like “um, this is not true, and in fact, it’s gonna lead to shit like whooping cough and measles and so on having a resurgence (which is happening as we speak, actually), so seriously, please PLEASE vaccinate your child” and on the other side was respected iconoclastic medical personality Jenny McCarthy. I mean, um…

This should have not even been an issue. Jenny was parroting the ideas of a UK doctor who has since admitted that his claims had no basis in research results or any other sort of fact, and who has subsequently been thrown in jail for peddling his pseudoscience. There’s no point where the quack and the former host of Singled Out (look it up, kids) should have been given an equal platform alongside all the Rest of the Medical Professionals in the World, but a funny thing has happened in our 24 hour media cycle of a universe. Suddenly, two opposing viewpoints can be presented as THE two sides of an argument (see: should we build a mosque right on Ground Zero or not? Which side are you on [notice there’s no room for the {highly logical} ‘um, this isn’t a mosque and it’s not at ground zero’ viewpoint])? and voila! We’ve got people not vaccinating their kids because some dipshit with a communications degree and 24 hours to fill decided that putting the skanky wingnut and highly dangerous fringe up against the entirety of rational thought, pragmatic and responsible discourse and general sanity would be a great idea because it’ll play and create follow up stories that can fill subsequent 24 hour cycles ad infinitum.

In a way, it reminds me of religion. And here’s what I mean: There’s no inherent difference between hardass atheists and fundamental religious people. They’re both arrogant and cocksure and refuse to listen to any opposing viewpoints and they’re both pretty much talking out of their asses when it comes to their ideologies, because the ‘big questions’ of the universe don’t have answers, so no: you’re not right, atheist prick, and no, you’re not right, fundamentalist religious nutjob. You’re just both arrogant deesh that don’t really know what you’re talking about and won’t listen to reason.

BUT, the thing that happens all too often is that the smug atheist is placed up against a person from a specific faith, and at that point, the game becomes totally skewed. I mean, there’s a legit debate in “is there a higher power/something more than science and dirt and recycled energy and entropy” but when it comes down to “Is Jesus the son of god, or is there no god,” well, come on…if those are my choices, I’d be an idiot not to side with the atheists. The bible, as we all know, is full of recycled stories from Egyptian, greek and other various mythologies and well, (spoiler alert!) it’s all a bunch of bullshit. You’d have to be kind of retarded to really, truly in your soul think that the bible is anything more than a haphazard handbook, hastily amended and rewritten hundreds of thousands of times that’s kind of oriented towards a general idea of how to deal with the possibility of something greater existing out there. To think of it in terms of any specifics at all is just dumb. A guy who was living in the middle east 2000 years ago wasn’t friends with people named John and Matthew and Paul, for starters. It’s just not an accurate document. BUT, for whatever reason, people insist on giving this one highly wacky perspective a fifty percent share in the entire talk of cosmic perspective.

That’s why, if you get your news from talking head tv, you’re likely kind of stupid. It’s not your fault, and it’s not to say that you’re not educated, but you’ve been ingesting a dumb dualistic view of a highly polyglot world that can’t be easily reduced to for/against arguments, and the idea of the entire perspective is based in no small part on the programming ideas of dumb people that work for TV and have to fill up time in schedules.

Anyway, long story short: this storm ain’t shit.

uh, this is uh...fucked up? booo!

You all know what’s going on over here? You want to know how Monday starts for the Kelly household this week? Pink eye! It’s like being at chong’s house, with all the bloodshot eyes and eyedrops and shades drawn and everything. Only instead of bongs and spliffs and topless chicks, we’ve got puzzles and stuffed animals and cut up apples and chicks with their beavers out (I hired them to act as sort of waitress/nanny/slaves to improve everyone’s mood for the duration of the malady). It’s actually not as awesome as it sounds, though it’s real close.

They say that pink eye is caused by bacteria getting into the eye, and if films like “Knocked Up” have taught me anything, it’s that the bacteria in question comes from the human ass/turd/poo vapors (or ‘farts’ if you’re a doctor), but here it seems more like it came from our baby. She’s the patient zero in this house and I can only speak for myself, but I haven’t farted in the baby’s face in like, a month, so I’m guessing she must have picked it up on the streets somewhere. Sometimes, just for fun, we’ll be walking along and I’ll just kind of throw her at a passerby just to see the reaction. It’s pretty funny. I’m trying to teach my older kid to snatch their wallets while these pedestrians are frantically trying to safely catch my airborne baby, but so far all he does is cry and scream “no daddy! Quit hurting baby!” He’s a real pansy.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s where the pink eye came from. Stupid, dirty, shit-eyed pedestrians. I took the baby into the baby mechanic to get her looked over on Saturday morning, and aside from the place being a complete fucking zoo (full of snotty kids that probably all have pink eye now [take that, densely populated part of the world!]) they prescribed her a tiny little thimbleful of antibiotic eyedrops that cost (get this!) eighty bucks! Now, thanks to the highly contagious nature of pink eye (and our family’s natural tendency to wipe our butts and then hold the toilet paper up to our eyes for a second) we’re all looking at the little tiny stash of eyedrops like a bunch of cokeheads eyeing that last corner of the baggie. If I have to go get another one of those fuckers, I’m gonna lose my mind (although I went to a very friendly, all gay pharmacy that I can’t recommend highly enough. It’s in the building with the REI on Halsted just south of the new apple store and it offers free home delivery. And did I mention that it’s entirely staffed by extremely courteous gay dudes? Oh, I did? Good. Well, it is. Anyway…).

It’s gotten me to thinking about how entirely fucked up the notion of not having regulation on prescription drug prices is. I mean, if you really want to look at the effects of free market capitalism on the patient/drug manufacturer’s relationship, there’s absolutely nothing stopping these folks from completely raping sick people. Okay, the notion here is that you can charge whatever someone is willing to pay for your product, right? Well, if your product is the difference between me living and dying, or being sick for the rest of my life, or not getting this herpes flare-up to go down in time for the next gathering of the Juggalos, you’ve got me completely by the balls. You could clean out my bank account for a tube of Zovirax or some eye drops or some penicillin or whatever it is that cures whatever it is that I’m gonna get next.

I guess that’s why cancer ends up being either the death of your body or the death of your finances. It seems crazy. The entire medical profession is governed by moral law first and foremost, with the Hippocratic oath and all that, but the administrators, the pharm companies and the price fixers, in stark contrast, operate in an atmosphere completely bereft of any morality whatsoever. I’m with Sarah Palin: we should just go up to Canada for our drug needs.

Oh, and going to Mexico for your drug needs is also highly recommended. They’ve got ‘doctors’ right there in the pharmacy that will prescribe you vicodin or valium or oxycontin or whatever (not that you should be taking those things if you’re not in acute mental or physical pain, folks!), and the shit’s cheap. Apparently they’ve also got people who sell drugs right there on the beaches and stuff. Now THAT’S classy! If I had pink eye down there, I’d just cruise out to the beach and be like “Reuben, put down those brochures for snorkeling and hook a brother up with some of those antibiotic eyedrops, eh?” And I bet Reuben would even set me up with a discount if I was staying in the hotel that he stood in front of, or if I promised to do his whale watching tour or something. That would be cool.

As is, I’m stuck here in quarantine and all I want is a fucking cheeseburger. I’m thinking Windy City Gyros. That’s the best cheap burger around these parts for my money.
Whatever. I’m out.
xoxoxoxox

cheers!

This morning while making my rounds on the interweb I’ve already come across two distinct articles about drinking less than delicious things to get drunk. One was a ranking of the worst tasting beers (spoiler alert: Bud Light Clamato Chelada made the list) and the other was the grossest shit that people drink to get drunk all over the world. Some of the featured brews in this article were a Kenyan booze that contains such ingredients as rocket fuel and battery acid (people often die while getting their drank on) and pruno, which is the delicious treat that prisoners brew underneath their toilets using sugar cubes and fruit cocktails and ketchup. Oh, and they also mentioned Russian aftershave. I guess folks are guzzling that shit too. It’s pretty wild what people will go through for a buzz, eh?

I mean, it’ Friday. All the world over, motherfuckers have been slaving at their various jobs all week, and this evening, everyone is gonna finally trudge out of the boxes that hold their souls hostage, take off their ties and/or pantyhose and gulp down fermented grains and fruit until they’re all staggering all over the place and fucking/punching each other with wanton abandon. It’s a wild phenomenon.

You’d think that there would be some sort of alternative method of repopulating/getting people to crash their cars at least somewhere on the earth, but no. Everywhere you go, it’s booze. Motherfuckers love to get drunk. And for whatever reason, we’re all kind of okay with it. There’s really nowhere that has a completely alternate method of allowable wastedness, is there? I mean, sure, in Holland (for example) you can smoke weed and hash, but I’d bet dollars to donuts that there’s way more booze flowing through Amsterdam than there is pot smoke. Even in those Muslim countries where all wastedness is illegal, booze is still the go to, as per what I’ve read about the illicit club scenes in Dubai and UAE and so forth.

You’d think with all the wacky ideas that people have about how to live, with all the wildly different cultures out there that there’d be a society somewhere on earth that completely eschewed alcohol and instead uh, all shot heroin after work (just for example). But no. There’s no LSD nation or cocaine nation or heroin nation, and even if there are places where that shit is more acceptable (Colombia comes to mind) they’re still boozers first and foremost. I mean, it bears repeating that motherfuckers are out there drinking AFTERSHAVE and ROCKET FUEL to get drunk.
That’s making it seem like a borderline instinctive need.

No, seriously. Think about fucking for a second. It’s an instinctive need, right? In Maslow’s pyramid, sex is down at the bottom with food and crapping. So, put a dude somewhere where he can’t fuck anyone…let’s say he’s a pumpkin farmer up on a mountain or a shepherd way out in the middle of the New Zealand boonies. What’s gonna happen? He’s gonna fuck those pumpkin/sheep eventually. Ladies, this is true. There’s not a man alive that doesn’t just know instinctively that a period of solitude, real extended and unbroken solitude is the only thing that separates him from those who fuck gourds/livestock (on a side note, I don’t know how this works for ladies. I don’t really think it’s the same. There’s no way a woman, left alone with a bunch of goats or pigs or something would eventually just wind up fucking them because they’d been alone for fifteen years and they really needed to get laid. I mean, right? Am I crazy? Does that mean that sex is an instinct to males only? I’m really not trying to be funny here, and if I wasn’t sure that my daughter was about to wake up and completely dominate my time to the point where I couldn’t maintain a train of thought well enough to write, I’d start this whole post over to just tackle this notion….woah. Woah. Woah. I guess tune in Monday for that, maybe).

Anyway, you see what I’m saying? People have to crap. Sometimes, in a pinch they’ll just crap on the floor or in their pants. People have to fuck. Sometimes they’ll wind up fucking pumpkins or pigs or the keyboard player because that’s the only option. People need to eat and sometimes people will eat rocks and dust or maggoty meat because their bodies are ORDERING them to eat something, no matter how gnarly. Doesn’t this same sort of necessity seem to apply to people who are out there drinking glasses of battery acid to get loaded? Now, yes…EVERYONE eats and everyone shits. Not everyone drinks. BUT, not everyone fucks either. Ever hear of lesbian bed death or nuns or any stand up comedian’s spouse? That’s still considered to be an instinct. I kind of think drinking may be too. How else can you explain Bud Light Clamato Chelada?

That’s what I’m sayin, bro. Have a good weekend. See you all in hell.

it gets...uh, wait. does it?

So, I guess this whole thing with gay kids and gayish kids (that is, not necessarily gay, but gay seeming enough that their peers call them names and harass them) is getting kind of out of control, eh? I mean, not the bullying so much (though that’s not in any way cool) but all the resulting suicides. I mean, now, don’t get me wrong, bullies suck (as someone who was both bullied and a bully [although I was a pretty minor league bully, as I always remembered what it was like to be called a fag and punched] I can attest to this) but the real shitty move here is the suicide. Nobody wants to say this shit out loud and I’m definitely not trying to be unsympathetic, lord knows every time I read one of these stories I die a little thinking about what my poor, sweet little kids have in store for them when they get a little older, but man…fuck. The people that are really committing the shittiest act here are the people killing themselves. Yes, they’re young. Yeah, they feel like shit’s bottoming out, but uh…doesn’t everyone at some point? That’s kind of where the drama of being a teen comes into play, right? Okay, let’s back up a bit:

I didn’t grow up gay. I realize that especially in a world where your family is important to you and religious and they unequivocally equate gayness to evil, that’s a pretty heavy burden for a kid, but I want to stop short of saying that it’s something I could never imagine. Kids are, by nature melodramatic. That’s why kids desperately cling to music and identities and sloganeering and ideologies and shit like that. Pain is pain and in my experience a kid that witnesses their parents hateful divorce, or suffers abuse at the hands of some grownup or gets put into a special class because they’re stupid or grows up a pimply lard ass or has to watch a parent die or has a drunk mom or any number of other things make life for a teenager just as unbearable as it can possibly get.

Sure, there are fat, pimply gays out there who grew up watching their drunk moms die right after the hateful divorce and that totally sucks, but at the end of the day, there’s something really weird going on here, and I don’t want to say it’s something that pertains to all these unfortunate teen suicides, but I’ll be damned if it’s not a factor in at least some of them:

Namely, the sort of shrinking of the world and global localization of news have taken all these very separate events and bound them together and the message that is being presented (the secondary message, mind you. The first message is obviously “omg! Bullies are so mean [which is true, don’t get me wrong]) is that a lot of gay or otherwise persecuted teens see suicide as a viable way out of their situation.
This is a slippery slope, because this IS going on, and it needs to be reported, but there are tons of kids out there that are unfortunately thinking about, or successfully killing themselves and I can’t help but feel that all this attention on these gay suicides further marginalizes these bullied, marginalized gay/gayish kids and sends the message that being gay is SO MUCH WORSE than anything else that for a lot of kids, suicide is the go-to option. That’s fucked.

How bout a report on how being a teenager is rough, and how kids are dramatic and there’s a huge cross section of kids who have these kinds of thoughts, not just gay kids or kids who are perceived as gay. It’s just not healthy to keep this problem (which is the third leading cause of death in teens, by the way) in the media as a ‘gay kid’ problem. It’s irresponsible and it’s gonna create a self fulfilling prophecy that’s truly, truly dark and ugly.

Now, Dan Savage, one of my personal heroes (I actually had the good fortune of taking a piss right next to him once, which was pretty great [strange] and his brother was my professor at Northwestern, which I awkwardly told him while we were pissing…sigh) started this whole “it gets better” youtube campaign, which is awesome. It’s a bunch of people talking about how yes, being young and picked on is hard, but suicide is never the answer and here I am, all growed up and gay and I’m rich and I’ve got friends and shit gets way, way better.” It’s a great project and even if it may be a little bit uh, what’s the word….dorky and grown up, I think it’s about as close as anyone’s come to really effectively addressing what’s at the heart of this issue, which is marginalization.

However, I gotta wonder, does it really get better or does it just get worse in a different way? I mean, I’d never go back to living in my mom’s house and going to highschool, but I don’t know that I’m really totally psyched on getting audited and growing uglier and closer to death by the day either…I dunno, like I said, the ‘it gets better’ thing is cool. Maybe I’ll start a youtube channel too that says shit like “hey, it gets kind of good for a second there, and maybe if you’re lucky, you can capitalize on that moment, but otherwise, it may not get better, but you’ll be able to buy fireworks and whiskey and pornography soon, so there’s that, right? Good deal. Hit the showers.”

Okay both my kids are crying. I need to pay them some attention, I guess.
Later dicks.