Category: Blather

For straight people, there’s a default life laid out: get an education, find a job, get married, have some kids and raise a family. By that time you’re 50, with another two or three decades to kill, worn out and ready for some peace, fat, complacent. You run out the clock.

For gay people, there’s no default life. The existential problem is more urgent. Marriage and kids are not an available option.

The above is from a blog post that Joe Clark linked to with the text Heterosexualist Christian does BlogJamDC. What happened is that a fan of Andrew Sullivan (a gay Catholic right-wing blogger that, coincidentally, Yossi Gurvitz rather likes) attended an event that Sullivan promoted on his blog, except that instead of being the political blogger event he expected, it turned out to be a gay blogger event.

I thought that his observations echo what I thought and felt when I first ran across a gay cultural event. In my case it was an evening of texts by gay writers called יש לו דרכים משלו, that was put together by an editor I worked with at the time, Yair Kedar. When they took the production to the Edinbrough festival, a friend of mine joined as one of the three actors presenting the texts, and when we met he confirmed to me that he was gay, and I told him that I was dating Suzie, because this made me feel an odd kinship with him.

Because I felt we had both put aside the default life.
But, bullshit.

Turns out that my friend (well, former friend – we aren’t in touch) had his eye on the default life. He got married (big wedding) and had a kid. OK, he’s divorced now, but so are lots of dads.

In retrospect, I realize that was bloody arrogance on my part – gay people are forced to give up the default life without any choice or ability to negate this (although my friend proved otherwise), while I was just a dilettante, taking what amounts to a self-indulgent vacation from the mapped-out path.

I submit that if I’d stayed with Suzie for the rest of my life (like John Brunner living from his twenties until his old age with a woman twenty years older), I would have abdicated from the default life. But, see, we broke up, and I didn’t.

I recall hanging around at friends’ weddings, seeing my peers with kids, feeling like a bloody romantic outsider, destined to walk a different path.
Turns out I was just a fucking tourist.

Girlfriend. It’s a funny old world when the same word is all you find on the shelf when you come to talk about both a woman you lived with for more than nine years, and a girl you kissed just two weeks ago. Need to go shopping for some new vocabulary, I suspect.

But girl – don’t want to say new girl, but yep, new thing in my life, is definitely Girlfriend. Funny, really. Like, one night we kiss, and part chastely each to a different home and bed, and that weekend we’re already parading together in front of the world. And it feels frighteningly right and good and proper.

Then I’m sick for the whole of last week, and she visits me when I’m a sick old man with insane bed hair, whiskers and stained pajamas, and makes my heart warm and happy and content.

I was going to talk about insinuations by the black-hearted that I am on a rebound, a topic which is suddenly at grave odds to my sappy and madcap mood. But pfah. Rebounds are for teens, or twenty-somethings. Adults dust off and get back in the ring, swinging for the nearest moving b… well, you know what I mean. If they have to get up and move, they might as well set their eye on a good reason to do so, a worthy goal, and make straight towards it with no nonsense or sentimental fluttering, no batting around the bush. Unvexed by teen doubts, adults aren’t afraid to reach out and grab at happiness.

Even if this happiness is in the form of sweet and sappy teen romance. Even if it takes me into the tangled heart of a social swamp that I have regarded with dispassionate eyes from a distant orbit for very, very long. Because it feels – and this is more of the scary stuff – like the most adult relationship I have had in my life.

I also wanted to talk about being sick. Sick people should not cook. No, especially not this “soup” stuff. Hearty meals are for the healthy. Sick people should eat light stuff like bread and chocolate and biscuits. I should make a note of that, believe me I’ll thank me later.

The universe is drained of links. Cold and icy and empty.
Well, maybe it’s just the “Internet”.

Speaking of cold and icy and empty, if in the book you’re reading the hero get to kiss the heroine for the first time, and the day you read that, you find yourself kissing someone for the first time, should you be worried if the next thing that happens to the heroine is being kidnapped through a dimensional portal by Cthulhu-worshipping nazi occultists from a dead and demon-haunted universe?

One wonders about these things.

Linkage, linkage… Firefox 1.0 got released, umm, yesterday. It’s my browser, and everyone should use it, so that when I ever have to come over to use their computer I can have tabs and stuff, and no annoying pop-ups.

Didi notes that, and also points to the collection of StrongBad answering his email flash animations, of which the only one I saw was the one about Trogdor the dragon.

Sigh. If I was I would have a neat segue to posting a link to the song in my head, River Deep, Mountain High (it’s all Warren Ellis‘ fault for putting it there).

Updated 11/11/2004: Ellis elaborates about River Deep, Mountain High in his next column:

Spector’s Wall Of Sound. An immense presence of information. His early experiments failed because he was a few years ahead of his time — the primitive studios of the Fifties couldn’t handle the tidal wave of information he was throwing at the microphones. But when the technology developed, he was ready, even if the rest of the world wasn’t. Probably his greatest achievement, “River Deep Mountain High,” just dumbfounded people, and was a commercial failure. Its label said it was by Ike and Tina Turner, but Ike had nothing to do with it — Spector came to him wanting Tina to sing it, and the deal was that Ike could have his name on it but would actually have nothing to do with it. Ike, desperate for a hit, agreed — though he recanted this version in later years. Probably because he didn’t get the hit.

It’s an instructive listen. I mean, it’s a dumb little song, like almost everything Spector produced. Spector was all about the epic elevation of manipulative pap. But there’s no slack in it at all. It is, if you’ll forgive the phrase, “widescreen”. Every second of its four minutes contains sonic information. Starts with an earthquake and builds to a climax.