curiosity and dead cats and that meow

To stem the many queries that have taken the dramatic form of "Oh my god! What was the deleted comment on your last blog?," I write here to inform that it was simply a double post that I eliminated.

Now back to your regular programming.

steve

Religious Debate

My noise reduction headphones and iPod have of late put me in an insulated bubble against intrusion as I walk to and from work these days.

At Dundas and Yonge Streets on Friday evening I spotted but didn't really register that the normal religious fucking nutbars -- a mumbling guy with a goiter the size of his head (no kidding) and a yelling Dutch-accented guy -- were missing and a third who normally stands at the periphery of the corner (I've seen the other two "chase" him from their turf) was on prime street debate geography. Still, none of that really stuck until afterward.

As I passed to cross on the green light (and that corner is shoulder to shoulder people moving as one, at that time of the day) a shouted "Fuck you!" seeped through some Mozart and headphone silence and I turned. The proselytizing fuckbar looked directly into my eyes and asked -- I more read his lips than heard him -- "Are YOU a homosexual?!" (Obviously the topic of discussion which prompted the owner of the shout to do his yelling).

I stopped, turned and strode rapidly toward him. As I turned I flipped my headphones off and he started to speak: "The bibl..." but stopped with my determined stride. As I reached him I put my nose literally at the end of his, took off my glasses, filled my eyes with as much disdain, hatred and hope for his personal harm as possible. And answered his question: "NO, I'm a cocksucking, asslicking, bumfucking, godmocking faggot!... Now stuff your opinions up your ass."

Amid the tightly bunched crowd I noticed a family (surely from the Ohio valley) nearly choke with delight and horror. The guy who had yelled for the religious dickwad to fuck himself whooped with delight.

Amazingly I was well up the street before he, the bible humper, began speaking again. This guy has a respectable ability to speak with incredible rapidity and without interruption.

Overall, it was THE most satisfying dialogue I've had in some, some time.

The Bearded Lady is Restless

When I was a kid -- 14 or 15 -- my new friend who had just moved to town became a life guard at my town's new pool. He had the greatest line of hair that rose up from his tiny Speedo and then circled-the-wagons around his belly button. He had some chest hair too, not much, and hairy legs

How I yearned for body hair like that.

Beware, oh yee that wish and hope. For yee may receiveth.

Let's get to the point. Nearly 30 years later I am not one of those pelts posing as a man, but I am beyond what the chat lines might describe as "medium hairy."

And I am greatly at odds with my body hair. It grows, it covers. I wish it dead. Well, um, hair is already dead apparently. So, I wish it gone.

Oh I trim to length my chest and belly hair -- I am at least bereft of a hirsutely adorned back, thankfully -- and shave outright certain other body parts (think gonadal tissue).

What magnifies the repugnance for my hair is its darkness against the pallor of my flesh (I described it once in a poem as the pallor of the downward facing side of a North Atlantic flounder). Now too that fitness is months and months and months behind me and litheness with it, I have become a pasty, hairy, flabby mess. I blame the hair in that equation. Tanning is easy enough in order to banish the grey/blue which is my Caucasian. Flabby's banishment is just around the corner as the gym fanaticism is about to start anew (I can always feel addiction coming on). But the hair, well therein rests the struggle.

I turned to the technology of exfoliation once; that is I waxed once. Waste of money with my hair's metabolism. Smooth for about 48 hours. And the aesthetician almost took my nipples with one of the yanks of the exfoliating strip. I fear it turned him on. I was unable to comfortably wear a dress shirt for a week. Rub, ouch, brush, ouch. Poor wee puppy dog noses...

I did once regularly shave belly and chest (when I had a chest and had no belly) but it's an at least thrice a week activity and for someone who hates even the daily thievery of time called shaving one's face... Then there's the in-grown hair thing -- doesn't make much sense to remove the hair to replace it with a field of a million tiny puss-filled zits.

My New Friend Jen in Calgary had her legs made permanently silky smooth through the marvels of laser hair removal and encourages me at every opportunity to try that route. The ads of PERMANENT hair removal beckon like the hairless, flat belly of the hair-free-zone that is my boyfriend. Laser removal feels like it might also be cash removal

At the root of it all is the syndrome commonly knows as wanting what we don't have. My last, oh, 600 boyfriends have been Asian. Some had minor body hair but always strategically placed and in proper amounts. And among the number of Asians I have dated, the total number of body hairs would surely equal the number of hairs on one of my ass cheeks. What one is attracted to one reasonably looks for in the search for one's own attractiveness, I suppose.

Mr. Hair-Free-Zone in Korea, however, complicates my dislike of my own body hair by (claiming, at least) to like my, ah, shagginess. So, in summary and not too subtly, as his barren follicles turn me on, so do my overly fecund follicles turn him on. But he's out of the country for a while and my belly-button lint is piling up prodigiously (note: belly hair works like a hay rake to drag the fluff off one's t-shirt or sweater and deposit it in a fellow's innie BB).

As I ponder my next steps, a hairball cough rising in my throat, I am thankful that I have no shoulder hair, tufts in my ears (let's not discuss nose hair) or overly hairy feet.

As for the owner of the Speedo when I was a young teen. He's nervous still when I talk about those days in this way, and he's now one of the hairiest men alive. But that's his wife's problem, not mine.

steve

Headline of the Year?

Well, this headline (I'll get to it, hold yer horses) should win an award of some sort t'other for sheer delightful and utter incomprehension, at least by those of us in the colonies.

Professionally I have been following the court investigations into some of the goings on of Hollinger International -- the baby of Lord Black of Crossharbour, or as he's now more commonly known as his fortune dwindles, Mr. Barbara Amiel, who continues to be known as "that bitch."

In any event, because of my distant involvement I reviewed a news clipping earlier in the year from the UK's Independent on Sunday, which was emblazoned with the following headline:

Lord Black cocks a snook at Canadian "kleptocracy" probe

Feeling decidedly Canadian when reading that I dispatched immediately, by email, to a colleague in good ol' London, a request for his translation. A response never arrived (although a CCed colleague in New York did join in also seeking clarity on the matter), so I'm left witless still in regards to cocking snooks, or cock snooking, or...

My first inclination is to picture a robust Thai fighting rooster set go on a character from Dr. Seuss?

I'd rather like to have someone cock a snook at me someday. I think... I know I'd happily reciprocate by probing them enthusiastically with my thick and powerful kleptocracy.

steve

Just A Little Off The Top

I had a 1950 Arkansas-styled brushcut/flattop/buzzcut until I was about 10 or 11 years old under direct orders of my father.

As a young kid I recall the ritual of styling the flat top before going to church. My mother would use a canister-styled, screw-the-product-up-from-the-bottom container of hair paste wax which looked pretty much like underarm-deodorant applicator sticks look today. I can still feel that sticky wax (and smell it too) as Mother Mary (her name, really) stamped the hair stick against my forehead with a faint "schhstuppp" noise a couple inches below my hairline and then slide it upward so the front, leading edge of my hair was glued skyward, (and the top third of my forehead shined slick).

I remember arguments (fights really) in our house when I was a kid. These particular spats were over hair. The utterance, "It's my house and you'll get your hair cut or live somewhere else" was not uncommon. One of my brothers chose to grow his hair the length he wanted, quit school and left home. Irony was he became a police cadet not long afterward and had to have his hair pretty much shaved off. The mutton chop sideburns went too.

My single point of vanity is my hair, really. I remember the turning point when my mop went from it being hair to being HAIR. I once always prided myself on not paying more than a few dollars for a cut. I could get a cut and style for less than $5 at The Bay in downtown Calgary in the mid-'80s. A nice woman, a Vietnamese boat person who burdened me with tales of incredible hardship in her journey to Canada, was my hairdresser. She never ran out of anecdotes of the hell she and her family had to endure. And I never ran out of questions to ask her.

Tired of these "bowl cuts," a girlfriend (yes,you read the gender correctly) paid the big bucks (more than I pay even now, nearly 20 years later, for a cut) every month on my behalf and a very gay gentleman named Anthony inappropriately leaned his crotch into my shoulder and gave me hair style. GQ style according to the woman forking over the cash for the cuts. I have never looked back -- regarding haircuts I mean. It was some years later before I never looked back on guys leaning their crotches into me.

But hair as politics? Hasn't dawned on me in two and a half decades, except when raised in my mind by the occasional "Hair, The Musical" revival.

Seems, however, the Koreans care.

Having a shaved head in S. Korea is a big no-no. It's reserved only for monks, and it seems, for those who wish to be viewed as freaks. My "he who is there and not here with me" shaved his head (#1 clipper-blade-guard length) once a week while living in Canada. One of the first things said to him when back on Korean soil was about the need for his hair to be longer. "Fast and here's a hat." Since home he has started a part-time job as a waiter -- his hair only about a month from last shaving -- and his manager immediately pointed out his hair must be longer. I guess length does indeed matter.

Compare that with our Korean friends in the North. There long is wrong. In NK a recent official campaign by the government (jeebus, what a misnomer for that zany freak-lead system)entitled, "Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle" implores men to cut their hair. Preferred length? One to five cm. Ahem, the crewcut was among the styles given the happy nod. What I can't figure out is: have you seen the hair on the his wackiness, the exalted leader. He's poster boy for Idiot Despot magazine AND the campaign to fry one's hair with home perms -- although rumour has it even Kim has trimmed his '70s Afro in accordance with the latest "let's try to get the good NK people thinking about anything but the fact we shipped their rice to Japan and left them with burlap soup to eat" campaign.

Government strategy: "Today a haircut. Tomorrow we more credibly threaten the free world with tales of our new (well-manicured and coiffured) nuke-loaded ICMBs."

North Korean men are expected to get a cut every 15 days. It helps them reflect their ideological purity. And when you're being starved to death by your own government it's important to look your best, really.

"So I tucked my hair up under my hat and went in to ask them why..."

Succumbing to what one says one would never do (and living with the shame)

A friend's mother used to iron her sheets (don't all mothers of a certain generation?) not because she was an ironing control freak but because as she used to claim "I can't sleep feeling all wrinkled." She meant it.

I love bedding. A friend talked me out of buying this wonderful, French-made silk, celladon-green duvet cover before Christmas. Remember, this was just the cover for a duvet. It was nearly a thousand bucks. I'd convinced myself I needed it. Luckily I didn't buy it and the same friend made me a silk-taffeta, celladon-green duvet cover for Christmas.

That begged new sheet sets to go with it. I found a lovely "dirty" yellow coloured set that matches wonderfully. Not the finest quality available, but the colour was perfect.

I've never had a set of sheets that so angrily refuse to assume anything but a "been packed for 15 years in a pressurized stuff sack" look. I wash on permanent press, take them out of the dryer early... Regardless they are amazingly wrinkled at a macro and micro level. It's egyptian cotton, good thickness (and let's face it thickness beats length any ol' day; ahem, but I digress) and high thread count (but under 300!! -- remember the colour was pefect).

SO, last night, very tired at about 1 a.m. after my on-line Chat with Korea I toddled off to bed only to find I hadn't made it up after stripping it for laundry earlier in the day. Good news in a sense as it was the turn of the new yellow sheets to be on the bed. The frumpy wrinkled mess that was the fresh smelling sheets glared at me.

Yes, it's true. At that hour I got out the iron. To do something I've often said I'd never do -- iron sheets. Not utterly crazy I ironed only the pillow cases and the top horizontal strip of the flat sheet -- the bit that one sees when the bed is made and the sheet folded down... Still didn't achieve that crisp look, but they were not gullied and valleyed with creases and with what if on my face would be called laugh lines.

I slept better. My head and upper chest at least feeling, oh, less wrinkled.

Another reason to continue the frantic search for a therapist.

steve
As a postscript, it is amazing that while I don't do a lot of ironing, I have been required to iron shirt most working days of the last 12 years or so, yet I never put a hot steaming iron to cotton to be enveloped in that smell (love the scent, hate the task as the Catholics would say) without thinking of my mother ironing. She did a lot of it. The spritzer and steam functions on her irons was either missing (not yet invented?) or, when those models made it to our home, were out of order, choked with the minerals of our town's water supply. Mother would fill her measuring cup with warm water and dip a potato brush into the water and with a few rapid wrist snaps flick sprays of the water onto the clothing, some water always hitting the hot surface of the iron, spitting and sighing with the heat.

False Spring

The potted, forced-by-refrigeration-to-believe-it-springtime crocus blooms on my desk are dying. One just opened this morning and another has just almost unfurled this afternoon, but the rest are withered purple sheets of decay after a few days of resplendent life.

Saffron is made from the stigmata of the purple crocus -- apparently 160,000 flowers are needed to produce a kilo of the dried stuff. Explains the expense and the exotic nature. Stamen are also used, but only in cheaper versions -- the stamen lacks the colour and scent.

Isn't it wonderful that the female organs of a flower are called stigmata -- one can only imagine some early plant scientist staining his hands with pollen...

My 15 or 20 crocus blossoms will be snipped off and tossed in the trash. Perhaps I should dry them and give their fragrance to my rice. I don't think the crocuses on my desk are the same as those grown to produce saffron, but are crocus nonetheless --a shared heritage.

Maybe I should climb into my refrigerator, sit there in the dark for a few days -- to emerge believing spring's arrival upon me. I might blossom then, even so briefly as the crocus.

Sole Searing

I'm limping today and a colleague at work asked the cause of it.

"Had some warts fried off my foot by my doctor."

I might as well of shot her ass full of dry ice as apply it to my foot for the reaction she gave. Only partially recovering, she said, "Oh, well you're certainly open enough about it." She then weakly smiled and moved on. This is a woman with an excellent sense of irony.

Have I been asleep since the Dark Ages receded? -- not sure that's even an accurate allusion. Were warts feared in Christianity's hey day? Anyway, are people still ashamed of warts? Who knew? Better, who gives a fuck? I have half a mind (so tempting to stop the sentence there, eh?) to go pull my socks off for a wee dance on the woman's desk.

But that it would hurt at the moment.

In case you don't know, dry ice (see the oh so witty reference above) is used to burn warts back to the hell from which they arise. Well, okay, actually warts are viral and burning them off simply removes their surface manifestation. The body eventually defeats the virus, but that can take many many years and the warts are free to raise a wee polyp when they will.

So, my doctor takes a scalpel to scrape the surface covering off the wart and then takes this industrial, out-of-context looking can of dry ice and blasts the warts. OHIP only pays for wart removal on the feet (plantar warts) so this blasting was administered to my left foot in two places on the meaty part of my foot below my middle toes.

Yah, hurts like hell. Akin to someone figuring out how to burn ice cubes while holding them to the sole of your foot.

I think Benny (my doc) was a bit over zealous this time as one of the burn sites developed a wonderfully bulbous blister, which has been more like walking on a marble than was the wart.

But we're not done. One application is never enough. Wait a couple of weeks to let the wart show renewed growth, return to holder of dry ice, and repeat.

Hold on a second to the image of the fire ice applied to skin. Now let me tell you about a friend who had genital warts on his dick. Yup, burn baby, burn.

steve

HEAD of the class

Notwithstanding the idiot psychologist at UWO who a few years ago(using faulty science, which was the real problem) universally linked head size and IQ with race, it seems (see a British study published last fall) there is quite a link between brain size at birth and subsequent growth rates of the brain in young'uns, and cognitive ability throughout one's life; faster thinking for the big brained kids, while indeed those will smaller brains suffered greater cognitive decline with old age.

This all popped into my own smallish head when I found myself last evening explaining to a non-English-as-a-first language person the phrase "Don't let the little head think for the big one." Like the research has confirmed, inevitably, the big head does all the good thinking, proving its superior intellect. But the little head is a pushy prick.

So, I find myself in a relationship in which the parties involved (ah, me et him) are separated by some 10,500 miles. The distance between the downtown cores of Seoul, SK and Toronto. He is, as the mean bitch fate would have it, someone about whom I find myself thinking in future tense. Not incidental for someone like myself who often has mental fantasies about the horrid and searing breakup, before the first cum towel is dried.

The practical thing over such distance in a relationship would be to forget any sense of physical ownership. Um, we should fuck who we want when separated by such distance and what will be months and months and months of time. "Gawd, it's only sex, go for it." That for me it turns out, however, is the little head thinking.

Not to be presumptuous, but I had a clear opportunity to have sex with a beautiful and engaging friend this past weekend -- no strings attached. Two self-described lonely people wanting simply to toss some fluids about. But I couldn't do it despite an overwhelming physical WANT to do it. Aiiiiieeeeyah!

It's not about morality, which I would define as a universal or big "g" Good. I just don't have those kinds of hangups about sex -- I did, after all, implore my GP to write "slut" in my file after our first meeting (I have discovered he did not as the College would, it seems, frown upon such unprofessional behaviour -- the humourless, regulatory bastards!). But having sex with someone else other than the he that I am in love with (10,500 miles as the Boeing flies or not)is wrong for ME. If it were a moral wrong, I would be judgmental of my non-monogamous friends and I am not. I don't think they are doing anying Wrong. Further, in my own case, and importantly, it is wrong for my "him" too -- in a couple of senses. He too feels it wrong for him to find boink beyond the relationship, and I would find it hurtful if he did so.

Monogamy in my world is a gift I expect and give. A defining gift, in fact. Without it, for me, there is no relationship, really. I have softened in this regard, in some ways, with time. In the past if anyone cheated on me they be "out the door" no explanations wanted or needed, thank you very much. Now I understand that "mistakes" can happen, even deliberate ones with myriad and wonderful justifications. But to sanction those mistakes from the get-go. Well, that continues to confuse me.

With the little head's insistence I sought permission for having sex with others. It was granted. So, this weekend I would not have been cheating as after all I had permission. But I have come to realize one can't gain permission to justify away what one believes is hurfully wrong for one's self and for the one whom you define as the last person to whom you want to bring pain.

Bluntly I understand it wasn't permission I was seeking, but the exact opposite -- I wanted to hear that he felt the same way as I did and in subsequent conversation have learned that indeed I was told what he thought I wanted to hear. My asking (and thus belief I had decided) was a great disappointment for him, as was his "go ahead, just don't tell me about it" for me.

What has since transpired is a firm declaration that I don't want him to have sex with others and he doesn't want me to have sex with others and we will do what we can to honour that promise.

The truly funny part of this was his telling me today that he felt so sorry for me after our discussion. As if going a period of time without sex will damage me somehow. HA! That really put things in perspective for me. How silly. It IS just sex afterall, to use that phrase in a more appropriate context.

So, rhetoric, belief and behaviour are all in sync, for the moment.

So long as the little head doesn't win the argument, some lonely DSB-haunted night :)


Steve

A Beginning

I have decided to blog in order to facilitate regime change in North Korea. I believe my insights into the Hermit Kingdom will bring it's opaque walls crashing down and prompt rice and kimchi to flood to the starving millions...

Or not.

A couple of friends blog. Writers both. I've had business cards saying I'm a writer, but that remains the only evidence these days. So the hope is a blog, as infrequent as it may be, will prompt me to write. And since writing begets writing, perhaps some new poetry or short fiction will rise from my loins (sorry for the metaphor -- both in terms of its technical incompetence, as well as the imagery it may have produced, even in its weakness, for those who do not want such mental views.)


A co-worker was in DC for a speech writing conference last week. Delivered to my 'what's for me' paws a most tacky campaign button for Dick and Bush. The most powerful, richest country on the face of the earth and the men who lead it have a campaign button such the boys'ld be embarrassed to wear it mucking pig shit in the mountains of Arkansas. Which is why I like it and will wear it. Not in support of the cunts, but because it'll remind me the very balance of our safety on this planet rests in the hands of petty, tacky men.

Oh, yah, blogging. Suppose to be about me, right?

Ah, next time. Just wanted to warm the page.