For the record, energy bars taste nasty. Here I am -- a night without rest -- trying to give my body them juicy damn nutrients it so needs and I have to find out the hard way, it tastes like shit. Claims of chocolate, caramel and peanut I have now debunked as wholly false. I'd barf but it isn't worth it. Friggin' thing set me back two bucks and change so you better believe I'm eating it.
Oh and I'm trying to wash it down with a Strawberry Guava flavored drink that says it'll give me the all the B-vitamins I crave. It'll be the last Strawberry-flavored anything I have until I eat strawberries again.
Why in the world am I trying so hard to give myself these high-flutin' health thingys? Hell if I know. Normally, I'd roast up a couple wienies in the microwave and call it even, but I had a bout of temporary insanity, bought into the marketing and now am struggling to put away almost four dollars worth of cardboard and frothy vomit.
Last night in the belly of the Gecko, I had a thirty-minute spell where I thought I could be having a heart attack. Nothing but bad health could have provoked it. Or maybe excitement, which is growing by the day whenever it occurs to me that I'm about to be released on my own recognizance. Well it passed and I decided that it'd be a good idea to stay up all night.
In the bathroom, trying to take a leak, a supervisor said, "Chris, I want you to know that on a personal level, I hate to see you leave. I hope it's to pursue something better."
Normally, I get nervous when men speak so flatteringly in the restroom, but it was cool because this dude is a hard-core conservative and married to boot (we all know that right-wing married men are never caught being gay behind closed doors or in police stings). That and he's a good guy. I took it well.
"Well thanks. Yeah, it's a good deal," I said before I realized I was just standing at the urinal, trying to pee but not actually peeing. Oh, the age old battle between evacuation and elocution, between draining the lizard and ignoring distractions. I nearly cheered when the first few drops splashed against the disinfectant biscuit that urged me to "Say No to Drugs!"
Public Service Announcement: America, we will never -- as a country, as a people -- take the War on Drugs seriously when its primary message is, by necessity, being literally pissed upon.
The intimacy between men is what I was getting at before my sidetracking expedition began. It's hard for a man to even pee when he's just talking to another man. This isn't because it isn't in our nature, it's by our socialization. First there's the whole "shut up and take it like a man" thing (which really doesn't sound all that different than "squeal like a pig" to me), but that's just the tip of the iceberg.
*Somewhere in the early 20th Century, Americans got hip to sex and with Freudian psychology gaining acceptance, the sexualization of touch took place. Simple touch took on a connotation of foreplay and intimacy instead of general communication. Activities that were once common among heterosexual men went under the microscope. Touch meant sexual interest and two men couldn't have that. Boom: the birth of homophobia in the US.
Fast-foward 80 someodd years and the effects of intense social examination of every hetero male gesture has made it so I can't even make myself pee if I'm talking to another guy.
Contrast that to something I learned only hours ago from an unnamed female friend. In short, a girlfriend of hers once dyed her pubes red and tried shaving them into a heart-shape for Valentine's Day. How does my friend know that? She saw the aftermath, which she reports looked nothing like a Valentine -- just a oddly cropped mess of stained hair and skin.
Good intentions.
That reminds me. I was reading the Weekly World News recently and I learned that the highway to Hell was not paved with good intentions, but rather something else. I don't remember right now what that was.
Anyway... go Steelers!
*"The Way We Never Were", pp 194-196, Stephanie Coontz
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