Here I Sit All Broken Hearted

It amazes me at times what you can see in a bathroom stall which the previous user really should have cleaned up.

The most common — and perhaps most disgusting (but please don’t offer up worse things, thanks very much) — are mystery trails of dried liquid.  Many a clueless man (I’ve talked to some of them) has sat there and thought “What a lousy paint job, to have missed those drips” or “The cleaning staff needs to wipe up the disinfectant dribbles better” before realizing that the drops are the seminal remnants of previous stall users.  Cum, that is.

What kind of an idiot feels the need to beat off in the bathroom stall at work, especially at a high tech company where the employees are in theory a bit better educated and refined?  (In theory.)  Are they wanking over the hot chick in Human Resources, or maybe the bear cub in Tech Support?  Do they do it in the middle of the day, while someone else may be grunting over squeezing out something else in the stall next to them?  Or are they working late, maybe cruising porn sites, and came in for quick relief?

But more to the point, why the fuck can’t they clean up after themselves?  Grab a little toilet paper and jerk off into that.  Or catch it in your hand and wipe the cum off from there.  Or for God’s sake, if you can’t control yourself any better than that, at least wipe off the wall when you’re done!  Are you trying to “mark your territory,” akin to a dog pissing on a tree?  Is there some secret thrill that you get from knowing that other people may come in later and see your dried slime trails?  And what does the mirror in your bathroom or the wall behind your bed’s headboard look like, since I assume that if you can’t be bothered to clean up the stall at work, you must not do it at home, either.

I guess the one thing to be thankful for with this is that I’ve never found the slime trails when they are wet.

But dried cum isn’t the only mystery substance to be found in the stalls.  (No, I didn’t find a baggie taped behind the toilet tank!)  This morning, glancing under the stall wall while using the urinal, I saw a bunch of short hair trimmings.  Three possibilities:

• The guy got a haircut on the way to work and was shedding clumps which the barber did a lousy job of brushing out.  I’ve had little shreds litter my papers and keyboard before, but this was a lot more than that.
   
• The guy trimmed his beard in the stall, probably while taking a dump — might as well do double-duty!  You would think over the bathroom sink would be more efficient, although
  maybe he had a mirror he hung on the back of the stall door.  But it sure looks like he would have ended up with prickly beard trimmings in his underwear.
   
• Or he was trimming his pubic hair in the stall.

Whatever.  Just clean the fuck up after yourself!

(Weblog Title Reference: From the infamous bathroom graffiti poem, “Here I sit all broken hearted / Tried to shit but only farted / Then one day I got the chance / Tried to fart but shit my pants.”)

---

Updated on September 7, 2004 (less than an hour after initial post)

And let’s not forget spitting in the urinal but missing, leaving the loogie to drip over the side and congeal and dry into a frothy mass.  Ick!

Updated on April 19, 2011

What is “Kinky”?

I’m not about to try to define the word.

It seems to fall into the same class as obscenity: “I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it.”  Pinning it down (ooh, there’s something kinky… maybe) is impossible, because
the specifics differ from person to person.

What I will say, though, is this:

If you do it, it’s kinky.
If they do it, it’s perverted.

(And if you don’t do it but you’re still oddly intrigued, then it’s edge play.  Because you’ll probably try it someday.)

---

Updated on March 16, 2011

What is a “Twinkie”?

For more than a decade, the term “Twinkie” has been in use in the gay community, especially in the leather and bear sectors, to describe a certain type of guy.  While it is usually used derisively, in good queer form it has been embraced by those it was used to describe and turned into it’s own self-affirming and descriptive term.

It amazes me, though, the number of people who apparently have no idea what the term means.  They have this hazy idea that it means “young guys” or “club kids,” but they miss the what-should-be-obvious derivation.  (Maybe this is an indicator of the post-modern nature of our society today, that we refuse to look for the obvious or surface connection, instead expecting irony or conspiracy in everything.)

Here, then, is a definition (as posted to the Handball list at QueerNet):

A "Twinkie" is made of light, golden sponge cake, stuffed with cream filling, loaded with preservatives, and not very good for you.  (With apologies to Hostess.)

Ergo, human Twinkies are likewise fluffy, full of cream, and not very good for you.  They are often quite young, but if Twinkies have an alleged 17-year shelf life, so may human ones…

(Hostess also used to make both chocolate and chocolate-covered Twinkies, just in case you think the human variety is only blond.)

---

Comment by Fritz (from New York) on June 28, 2004

You may think you are being witty, Jim, but by posting that drivel publicly, you not only offended our young friend in San Diego, but potentially everyone on the list who is under 30 or maybe interested in guys under 30.  Please note that this is not a public post, it is private to you.  What I find astonishing is that a self-styled “daddy” who is 36, turning 37 soon, would put out a public post so contemptuous of younger guys.  If you are not interested in meeting, connecting with and perhaps helping younger guys, because, according to your post, they are all “fluffy, full of cream, and not very good for you”, what in hell gives you the right to call yourself a “Daddy”?  I’ve earned that right, boy, both by benefit of age and by being willing to meet and judge any man on his personal attraction for me and to me, his willingness to learn, and his intrinsic merits, not arbitrary standards of age, race, class, income, etc.  There is a word for such arbitrary judgements, and the word is bigotry.  By my calculations, legal age plus your shelf-life of a “Twinkie” is 18 +17 = 35.  Since you recently passed that barrier, do I detect a faint whiff of bitterness from an ex-twinkie who now wants to pretend to be a daddy?  Get a life, and learn a little humility when talking to a forum of men who have far more experience and compassion than you are willing to demonstrate.  If you consider this a flame, so be it.  One of the benefits of my advanced age — I’m approaching 60, and proud of it, and I’d hate to see your opinions of older men — is a flame-proof asbestos suit against wannabes on the Internet who think they are being clever.

Two words, Jim. Grow up!

And my response back to him, which I sent back publicly (intentionally so, despite his original comment being not to the list) to the list the original definition was posted to, also on June 28, 2004

I’m sorry you were unable to see the humor intended and (I think) inherent in what I posted.  Several other people e-mailed me to say they enjoyed it (but that’s just anecdotal evidence, I realize).  But you know…

The surest way to get me to air something publicly is to all but dare me to post it, to let the world see you attempt to smack someone down.  Want to try to avoid having them smack you back?  If you’ve got something foul to say about a public post I made, dear, you can say it publicly.  Or I’ll say it for you, in your own words, by letting everyone know exactly what you’ve said.  Especially if you are someone who repeatedly shares his “wisdom” and “goodwill” with the list, establishing a gentle and fatherly tone.

Any respect I had for you is gone, Fritz.  But I’m sure you expected that, and that the feeling is mutual.

---

Updated on February 11, 2011

In other words, Fritz somehow assumed that (a) I hated the fact that I was in my mid-30s and growing older and (b) that I believed that “Twinkie” applied to all gay men in their 20s.  Neither of which was true, of course.

But to reiterate for clarity:

If a guy is fluffy, full of cream, and not very good for you, he's a “Twinkie”.  Such gay guys are often (but not always) young.

Apropos of nothing, Fritz died in 2010.

This was the first blog post I’ve done addressing this.  See also this one for a later one, with some research into the origins of the term.

The Nose Ring

Three weeks ago tomorrow, I got my septum pierced.  (That’s a ring through the cartilage at the bottom of the nose.  Think Ferdinand the Bull.)

Why did I do it?  Well, with winning the Seattle Leather Daddy contest in November, I got a certificate for a free piercing from Troy at Apocalypse.  I’ve already got a pierced ear and a Prince Albert (head of the dick, going through the urethra and out the bottom), and I’ve previously had (and removed) a nipple ring and a tongue stud.  So it is was septum, labret (below the lip), guiche (between the dick and the asshole), or a lorum (a bar or ring at the base of the dick where it meets the scrotum).  (Or I suppose I could have got something bizarre like a uvula piercing.)  I’ve always thought septum piercings looked cool — and with a small retainer in place of a ring, they can be tucked up into the nose, nearly invisible — so that’s what I went for.

(Not that I had to use the certificate, of course, but I wouldn’t want to spurn the generous donation Apocalypse made to our club.)

At the time, I had the choice between a split ring (with a gap at the bottom and two balls), a captive bead (where a ball sits caught between ends of the ring, or a retainer.  I chose the split ring because it can be rotated up into the nose to hide it for a while (such as if I have to visit my mother).  I could have gone with the retainer, but I figured that if I find the piercing just a little irritating (and I have at times), I might be tempted to remove the retainer and just ditch the piercing, which I’m unlikely to do with the full ring.  I wanted to make sure I stick with it.

After eight weeks, it should be healed enough to change the jewelry.  At that point, I’ll probably go to a retainer for daily wear, saving the ring — or getting more dramatic spikes and such — for weekends and special events.

The set of reactions I’ve had since then have been unusual.  In general, people do their best to just ignore it.  I haven’t noticed many cases of people looking at the ring rather than the rest of my face.  A few co-workers have asked some specific questions about it — like “What did you do to your nose?” (“Nothing,” I replied.  “The piercer did that.” <grin>) — but no vocal negative reactions.  Of course, this is Seattle, which was one of the places the trend of facial piercings came from.  That, and people generally just try to be polite.

(And of course, there’s the typical “Did that hurt?” question.  In gay circles, I answer that quite matter-of-factly: “Just enough that my dick started getting hard when he shoved the needle through.  With my teenage step-daughter in the room, watching.”)

But the last weekend of February, I went to Texas for LUEY.

Walking through the airports in Dallas and Houston (but not in the hotel I was at, which was hosting the mostly-black attendees of a Narcotics Anonymous convention [I note the race just because it was the situation there, not because I draw a connection between blacks and drugs; heck, maybe it means blacks are more apt to try to recover from such addiction than whites!]), I kept getting cruised.  Or so it seemed, but when I would try to make eye contact and cruise back, I kept getting deep scowls, of the “That guy is gay, isn’t he?  I don’t like queers” sort.

It wasn’t until coming through Dallas on the way back that it hit me that the guys weren’t scowling, precisely, but were instead staring at the nose ring.  The scowl was more one of confusion than dislike: “What the hell does that guy have hanging from his nose?”  Hard to say if I was being cruised as well, or not.

Or maybe the look was “Who let Ferdinand the Bull loose in here?”

---

Updated on March 9, 2004

Updated on November 8, 2005

Comment by Adam D. (Columbus, OH)

In the deep dripping South, it is sometimes held by religious precept that you should not place any marking on, or hole in, your body, because it’s going to make you unworthy of resurrection.

I think there could be a fundamentalist-Christian thing there…  Oh, looky Ma a sinner… he’s going to Hell.   Same reason, I suspect, that until last year (or maybe it was the year before?) you could not legally be tattooed in South Carolina.

Genesis 1:26-27, God said, "Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves, and let them be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven, the cattle, all the wild animals and all the creatures that creep along the ground."

[That verse sometimes gets used to bash tree-huggers, i.e. we’re all fucking Masters of the Universe…what a bad idea that is.   And the very next verse is one that some of those guys try to use to get us Gay folk in trouble:

Genesis 1-27: God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.]

The anti-tat, anti-pierce idea is, I think, that God is flawless and unmarked, and so should we be also.   Don’t ask me where the notion of circumcision comes in — I’ve always been happier dreaming of God’s person as being male with a big uncut dick.  At any rate, seeing one always gets me to fall to my knees.

Updated on December 20, 2010

Hmm, looks like Ferdinand the Bull didn’t actually have a nose ring!

After a few days of trying to conceal the nose ring by turning it up, I gave up and just lived with it down.  Once I changed jobs, it was well enough healed that I switched to leaving it out during the week, putting it in only on weekends and times I’m going to engage in leather play or such during the week.  Except for those days I forget it is in and wear it to work.  Oh well, not like working for a music company in Seattle, people haven’t seen facial piercings!

Heading toward seven years later, I still have the nose ring — and I’ve added a lorum and had both nipples done (second time for one of them; “like punching through shoe leather” the guy said).  Still haven’t decided about a guiche someday, but might get another lorum ring.

The Passion for the Christ

Blasphemy ahead.  You’ve been warned.

I have zero interest in seeing the new film, The Passion of the Christ.  Seen one crucifixion, seen them all.  (Can’t we just rent Monty Python’s Life of Brian again?)  We needed another moving Easter film like we need another novel about growing up gay in the South.

Then again, maybe I will go see it.  I hear the whipping scene is hot.  Total wanking material.

---

Updated on March 2, 2004

Updated on December 15, 2010

Maximum Nipplage

I don’t know who won the Super Bowl this year.  Heck, I don’t even know who played in it.  But I sure do know that Janet Jackson has her nipple pierced.

I’m not offended by the accidental baring of the nipple of Ms. Jackson (since I’m nasty).  Per the CNN story, the intent was to rip away the bustier and leave the bra intact.  I’ve been a dance performer before, and I know that costumes don’t always behave as intended in the clinch.  (And although not actually performing at the time, I’ve had a pair of leather pants rip down the fly, through the crotch, and across the ass in the middle of a dance move, leaving my naughty bits hanging out for anyone to look at if they wanted.  Two boys from Sacramento wanted.)

Assuming it was an accident, of course.  The one buzz in the back of my head is the statement from Justin Timberlake on the subject: “I am sorry if anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance at the Super Bowl.  It was not intentional and is regrettable.”  Note the avoidance of a real apology (I’m sorry that you were offended, not that I caused offense); compare to Dr. Laura’s March 2010 “apology” for offending gays and lesbians a few years back.  And note that the final word of his statement is “regrettable” — this means something which can be regretted, not which I do regret.  These sorts of press statements usually have their wording very closely analyzed, so no word or phrase in them is accidental.

Talk radio — conservative and liberal alike — is going great guns on this, wanting to know “Are you offended?”  Damn right I’m offended.  I’m offended by the implication that I should be offended!