On Being (Briefly) the Hottest Man In the Bar

As I tug my sweatshirt over my head, my t-shirt rides up and the men at the bar -- who only seconds before were quiet dull Iowans -- are hooting and hollering like fratboys gone wild with jello shots, bikini girls, and MTV cameras. By the time I've got my head through the hole they're quiet again, grinning and winking, and I don't have to pay for my beer anymore.

I'm a star!!! Hot. Desirable.

Clarification: I am in Des Moines. At the Blazing Saddle bar. And it is January. It is 4 in the afternoon on a weekday. Most of the men at the bar are over 60. The younger ones -- and I mean that only relatively -- appear somehow different, in the Iowa sense of the word, dif'rent, as in there might have been some challenge there, cognitively, even before they started drinking as a career twenty years ago.

These clarifications clarify nothing for me. I'm the hottest man at the bar. The air sizzles with my seething sexual energy -- at least for me it does. And someone must have discreetly placed an air hose in my asshole because I feel myself expanding, swelling up. Soon I will rise into the air like a blow-up doll full of helium.

Except I am not full of helium. What I am full of is boring thoughts. Does he want me? Yeah, he wants me. Does he still want me? Yeah, he totally wants me. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot. Am I still hot? Yeah, I'm still hot.

Vanity is like a head injury. Suddenly there are no Icelandic novelists in my mind. No leaf-cutter ants of the Amazon. No Beats, no Surrealists, no Luminism. Actually, there isn't even any Iowa, even though I'm sitting in it. Is there a local beer? What are these men's stories? How old is this carpet? None of that. Am I hot? Yeah, I'm hot. Am I still hot? Yeah, I'm still hot.

I'm not content to let my hotness just sit around. No. I've got plans for my hotness. I want to go to all those sleazy clubs in Denver. I should fly to Amsterdam. Because this hotness -- this raw sexual force -- it ain't gonna last forever. (Am I still hot? Yes -- I think so. Maybe I should check? Maybe I should yawn and rub my belly seductively and see if anyone responds?)

Swollen up with boring thoughts, I find myself suddenly vulnerable. Anxiety arrives. Because I really ought to make it to the gym more often. Maybe get a trainer? How long has it been since I took any fish oil pills? Is a cheap moisturizer really good enough? What is 'photo-facial rejuvenation' anyway? What am I going to do when I'm 40? 45? 50? 55? 60? 65?

Plastic surgery is getting better all the time. Look at Madonna. What about penis enlargement? Don't hear much about that nowadays. Maybe I should do penis enlargement -- just as, like, gay sexual insurance? If I have mega-dong someone will always want me. Won't they?

A few hoots and hollers, one free Miller beer, and I have been transformed into a gay balloon of boredom and anxiety. Even making it to the toilet is going to be quite an operation because I appear to be taking up most of the air in the room.

The door to the bar opens with a shudder: a kid ambles in and knocks the snow off his boots. He looks sleepy; he's got three days worth of stubble on his college boy chin. He's not staying, just dropping off the free papers, but can I use the restroom sir? Sure you can. He's just a straight guy but I could convert him 'cause I'm so fucking hot except --

He Did Not Even Look At Me!!!

Which is probably a good thing because one side of my face has entirely collapsed, along with my inflated chest. Oh yes, I'm the Hindenburg disaster all over again. Zipping around the room, making a prolonged farting noise, like a birthday balloon somebody let go of. Nobody even notices this disaster because I am, like, invisible.

At last I come to rest back on my bar stool, a shriveled raisin limp-dick sort of man, a wizened husk.

My next beer I pay for. My career as the hottest man in the bar (god! it was glorious!) is over. From now on I'll have to fly economy, bag my own groceries, jack off.

As recompense, as a consolation prize, here is the world: Icelandic novelists and leaf-cutter ants, a long line of drunks sitting here at the bar in Des Moines on an afternoon in January when I was, for a very short time, the hottest man in the bar.

Of Visions

Recently at the sauna I met a 6'5" blonde Dutch muscle god, who as we lay together in a cubicle after sex, told me that he had had three visions.


He'd been an opera star in America but came back to Holland to care for his mother after she got cancer. For three years he took care of her and then she died. For two years he grieved, until one night he awoke to find her sitting on the edge of his bed. Just looking at him and loving him. When she vanished (and since that time she is always with me!) the room was full of light, he thought it must be morning, but when he pulled the curtain back it was still night.


The second vision he had was in the hospital -- the lining around his heart was swollen with water and he had to gasp for breath. Dozens of tests had been made but the cause could not be found. He had been prepped for surgery -- the water had to be relieved or he would die. In the hour while he waited, a light came to him and filled his body. When the nurse came to bring him to surgery, he was breathing normally. (And the refrain is always the same: and the doctors had never seen anything like it!)


The third vision was simple: he was out on his balcony in Germany and the light came to him and he saw that God was in the world and he saw that he was God. I say it's simple. It never happened to me. If I go out on a balcony, it's to guess what the weather might be -- and most of the time I'm wrong.


Synchronicity and psychic phenomena were sprinkled liberally throughout his story. For example, when he was suffering in the hospital, his best friend consulted a psychic who without knowing anything! declared "your friend has tears on his heart."


All this was told to me, as we lay together, rather sticky, after sex in a dark plywood cubicle at the day sauna in Amsterdam. I'd told him that I didn't ordinarily get guys like him. The tall Dutch gods generally only want each other, the very pretty or the very young.


"I'm deeper than that," he said. "I'm not religious but I'm very spiritual."


Gosh. Thanks. Let me make sure I understand. You're Saint Francis. I'm the leper.


I'm not religious I'm spiritual. Of all the infinite varieties of bullshit, that is the sentence I personally find most nauseating.


Then again, he was 6'5" and he did love his mother and he had spent the last hour, uh, ardently reciprocating, so I said, "Of course you are" and he went on to tell me his three visions.


"But I'm no better than you," he said, as a CEO or rock star might, knowing full well that he IS better, unutterably, self-evidently better. He's a 6'5" opera star who has seen God. I'm a jug-eared punk with a crippled leg and an unfortunate personality. It's my job to say that he was "gracious and down-to-earth" and consider myself lucky.


I do consider myself lucky, incidentally.


Sometimes I think it would be the easiest job in the world to be a writer of newspaper editorials. Most of the time, two opposite statements are both true. Especially in regard to human beings.


He was a profoundly and authentically spiritual person. C'mon. For three years he gave up his opera career, where death takes only eight minutes and arrives with an aria, to care for his mother. He didn't ask for those visions, they came to him. As for final proof, you'll have to take my word for it. I held him in my arms. There is some radiance that can't be faked.


He was also a shallow puffed-up egotistical ass. He was there to impart his vision -- since he'd already shot his spunk. I had no more right to claim mystic experience of my own than a cornflake.


I mentioned that I was the author of a well-received essay about the practice of Buddhist loving-kindness meditation in sleazy gay bars. But he was not interested, not in spiritual me. The termite.


I am forever amazed by how things can be so true and so false, all at the same time.


For example, how life manages to seem, on one hand, perfectly random and meaningless, and, on the other, as intricately and thoughtfully plotted as a door-stop Victorian novel, an old-fashioned one, unapologetically heavy-handed with impossible coincidences and deus ex machina.


Does life seem this way to you? Sometimes it's a monkey at the typewriter. Other times I want to clutch my hair and howl mad scientist style: Everything iz connected!


The 6'5" opera god lives in a world where everything has meaning and synchronicity spills out in every direction. I want to live in that world, too. Sometimes I think I do. Then there are times that magical thinking seems positively inspid, as if one day I had an epiphany: "Ohmigod! It IS all about me after all!" As if God were only an all-inclusive travel agent making sure the prize in the Crackerjack box has a special meaning for me personally.


Then again, there is a convincing case to be made, I believe, for the idea that God, at some point in the twentieth century, became exhausted by the population boom, and rather than puzzling out individual destinies, decided just to assign people plots from literature. My life, for example, is a transparently cobbled together mish-mash of common summaries. (I suspect God did not even take the time to read the book and thus we live out lives based on the Cliffs Notes.) My childhood was King Lear -- bad enough, followed by "The Fall of the House of Usher" -- even worse. Now I'm basically re-living Don Quixote, which is bruising, but, on the plus side, also very funny. It's a disco queer Quixote re-mix actually, wherein Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo are married -- but more about that some other time.


On the off chance that I am ever a ghost, peering back from the edges of life, what I will miss most are these small peculiar events, as when a hunk in a sex dive wants to discuss his spiritual life, or, on the Metro in Madrid, a man with an accordion begins to sing, and must sing double-quick so that he can collect his coins before the next station arrives.


Meaningful or meaningless? I am completely convinced of both. Adorable, certainly -- also obnoxious. And I do feel lucky (also unlucky) to be marooned in a such a world.


(10.22.08, Amsterdam)
(11.19.08, Madrid),

George W Bush: Vindicated At Last?

It may be that George W. Bush is about to be vindicated. Keep an eye out -- the bastard may yet turn out to have been right about everything.

The Bush administration will be utterly vindicated if -- on January 20th 2009 -- we find, under the mattress, three trillion dollars. Three trillion, better make it five. Five trillion dollars, somewhat damp and crumpled since we forgot we had it and put it through the laundry.

And if this turns out to be true, whoa, we are really going to owe George W. Bush an apology.

George W. Bush's environmental policies may be about to be vindicated. His frontier-attitude will be found to be entirely correct if -- on January 20th 2009 -- we find a new treasure trove of natural resources to exploit, as George W Bush has so fearlessly led us to exploit. If we discover, in an old coat pocket, say, a Brazil's worth of rainforest and Greenland's worth of ice.

Actually, considering the damage we've done, we'd better hope to find, in our attics and our basements, alongside the Civil War uniforms and the Atari cartridges -- another planet, brand-new. A gloriously exploitable brand-new planet, maybe two planets, or three at the rate we are going.

If this turns out to be the case, well, the policies of the Bush Administration will turn out to be entirely reasonable.

After all, he always said he protecting us. And perhaps he is about to be vindicated. It may yet turn out that clean water, which he has steadfastly opposed, is actually very bad for us. What if pure oxygen is carcinogenic? Well, then, we can thank George Bush. And it may yet turn out that civil rights are bad for us and we'll be grateful to George W. Bush for taking rights away from us.

Watch: Massachusetts may soon be reduced to a smoldering mass of purple ooze. Why? Turns out gay marriage really was dangerous after all!

And, if all this turns out to be true, well, then we'd better all apologize to George W. Bush, that bastard, because he turned out to be right about everything, after all.

Essay 01.12.09

Out. Only because I am afraid to be out. Checking my hair is just an excuse to make sure I've remembered my ears. And that my penis is -- where it should be and not over my shoulder or next door.

Wouldn't I like to have long black hair dyed on one side lipstick red? As it is, one is consigned to being odd 'for no reason that can be pinned down.'

It is the most natural thing in the world for someone like me to love museums. The space between things!

I remember the relief I felt in Chicago when I realized I only had to keep track of the ground floor. I guess I was afraid I might be hit by a falling filing cabinet. Or executive. (It took me several days to arrive at this realization.)

When he was eighty, Miro made art with two lines and three dots. I don't know where he is now. But by now I figure he must be down to one dot.

(Madrid)

18. Birch, Spruce

My father planted a stand of birch trees when I was born. Three trees for his three sons. One was rather spindly and I thought, "That one's me." Three decades later, spindly or not, that one has also grown into a tree. None compare to the blue spruce my father planted for my mother, her last Mother's Day. The blue spruce towers, fragrant, over the house.

17. Woodsman

I swam splashing to the raft -- to discourage hungry bass and also to attract the legendary scary hunky homo woodsman -- gay yeti of the Granite State -- wandering afoot at night clad in boots and overalls, smoking a cigar and keeping one hand on his axe handle. I waited naked on the raft surrounded by all that dark water and all that black night. And it was on nights like these I began to think I might just be all right.

"If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been completely at the mercy of sex." -- from the memoirs of Anatole Broyard.

16. Bait

Skinny-dipping in black water, enraptured and scared. The water, I knew, was pleased to receive me. Never mind my crooked body -- the water received me unconditionally. The water generous and teasing, nuzzling me between the legs as I swam.

Also I was scared a small mouth bass might dart up and nip the tip of my dick off. I'd never heard of this happening but I was 100% certain it had occurred somewhere and could happen again. Because the very best bait, as everyone knows, is a small thing wriggling and dangling.

15. Lovers

My first lover was a black pond beside a willow tree. An irrigation pond my father dug long before I was born. At sunset when I went to swim, a heron often vaulted up from behind the willow. That heron was a god to me: I addressed prayers to it. Year later, in Amsterdam, I was scandalized to find herons hanging out by the canals, taking donations even, and acting like, you know, birds.

"When you make peace with uncertainty, you find a kind of liberation. You are freed from bracing yourself against every piece of bad news, and from constantly having to work up a sense of hopefulness in order to act -- which can be exhausting. There's a certain equanimity and moral economy that comes when you are not constantly computing your chance of success."

-- Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self (p. 143)

Holy Books of Guttersnipe Das: Joanna Macy

World As Lover, World As Self
2nd revised version, Parallax Press, 2007

I read a lot of spiritual books. So many, in fact, I fear I am becoming immune. Most spiritual books seem awfully cheap and flimsy lately. Out of touch. Our world is gravely threatened and all most of these books can offer is a slimmed-down, buffed up self. Washboard abs for a gutted earth. The air is full of carcinogens -- but at least my teeth are white!

For real spirituality, for a view of the self and the world both exhilarating and useful -- see Joanna Macy. Put her picture in the dictionary next to the word 'visionary'. She is helping us re-imagine time, the world and the self. She's not skipping the pain and she's telling the truth.

We say "everything is interconnected" but what does that mean? We produce depleted uranium with a half-life of 4.5 billion years -- how do we even start to think about that kind of time? What if it's already too late? Am I just a drama queen when I cry thinking about the polar bears who drown because they can't find ice on which to rest? These are the questions I have -- and this is the book for them.

I read an earlier version of this book when I was nineteen, sitting in a college library. I remember writing "the forests are my lungs outside the body" and understanding a little bit and reeling. For a week, I staggered around like a man hit on the head with a plank.

If our species and civilization are going to survive, we have to take a humungous leap. Recycling cans and eating blueberries is not going to be enough. Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, Lester Brown are lined up with suggestions but where does the strength and vision necessary for transformation come? For that, Joanna Macy is the best guide I have found.