“I can’t come to your softball game this week,” the Manly Fireplug told me after he found out that Michael Alago of ROUGH GODS fame would be photographing him. “What if I took a ball to the face?”

“Like Marcia Brady?” I asked.

“Exactly. Then I’d never be a teen model.”

Somehow this all ended with me taking on the personality of Jan Brady, left at home while the prettier one was off modeling in the desert of Joshua Tree. But since part of our unconventional romance means that I can still spend time on sites  like Big Muscle Bears, I went there to soothe my lonely soul.

Then I received a message:

hey man -
came across your profile and im helping a friend restage the walter van beirondonck show may 9th in SF at the berkeley art museum. you’d be perfect to be in the show - its all muscle bears modeling in the show. should be a lot of fun – the team is coming from antwerp for the show. cheers!

Walter Van who? I followed a couple of links and watched a bunch of bears dressed in funny pastels lumber up and down a runway in Paris.

I had no idea why they were restaging this show at the Berkeley Art Museum, but I didn’t really care: his invitation included the words “muscle bears,” “modeling,” and “you’d be perfect in the show.”  Now, I have a complicated relationship with the whole bear thing. I like to think I’m above labels and categories (I mean, we all went to high school, we all grew up on John Hughes movies, we all know categories.) And even though I have a profile on Big Muscle Bears, it points out that I prefer to be called a “dingo.”

And yet underneath this thin veneer is another very thin veneer. Someone called me a muscle bear – me, the guy who came to college an inch shy of six feet and weighing 128 pounds soaking wet. That was about 70 pounds ago, but some things, like high school, linger.

They wanted me, Jan Brady, to be a runway model. And since it’s inevitable that designers everywhere, after seeing this show, will instantly grasp the benefits of using ONLY muscle bears in the future, I’m confident that this will lead to a whole new career. Screw the waifs. We’re taking over.

Of course I’ve only been approved by the Berkeley team. The Antwerp team still needs to weigh in. And since they are still looking for muscle bears, you too could be an unpaid furry runway model. Just send me an email and I’ll point you in their direction. But if you take my spot you will go down.

Marcia texted me from the desert: Whew, what a long day. Being a model is HARD.

In about two seconds I texted her the details of my new career. Jan, I wrote, Will rise.

My tenure on the blogroll of the New York Times came to a hilariously abrupt end after two days.  One day Dogpoet was there, the next day not. With no explanation given, I can only hazard a guess that it wasn’t so much due to my coy mentions of hot man-on-man action, but rather one of categorization. They had listed me under “Arts and Entertainment” for the San Francisco Bay Area, a clumsy fit at best. Since the Times has no “Personal Blogs” section, no “Stubborn, Cantankerous and Somewhat Misanthropic Writers” section, Dogpoet just fell through the cracks.

Thus the woeful story of my life as a writer, never quite fitting into the right category.  I’d like to earnestly believe that a guy could fashion his own category, and let the accolades follow.  But until then I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, now that I no longer have to worry about offending the cultivated sensibilities of the Times’ readership. Like boring you with photos that the Manly Fireplug and I took at the top of the tramway in Palm Springs, looking down at the Coachella Valley from the San Jacinto Peak.

I’m smiling because I hadn’t seen the Fireplug in two weeks. Also I’m afraid of heights and my balls felt funny.

Recently I noticed an uptick in my visitor traffic, and since anyone can see that I am far from prolific or even consistent these days, I knew it had nothing to do with what I’ve actually written here. So I looked into my search results. Many people were stumbling across my blog by typing the words “dog poet” into Google.

A reader first clued me in to what was going on. He emailed me the following sentence:

“In the latest Half Past Human report (The Shape of Things to Come 2009/2010), a “dog poet” is said to become a hero to up to 1 billion people in the Winter of this year and Spring of next.”

I had no idea what this meant. Absolutely no clue. But since he included a link to Half Past Human, I clicked on it.

There are vast stretches of the internet that make absolutely no sense to me. Complete gibberish. Sites where the language is so obtuse, the layout so incoherent, the lack of context so startling, so unwelcoming, that even after a few minutes of intense focus, I still have no idea what I am looking at.

You are welcome to try to make sense of the site. And I wish you luck on that endeavor. But if you are short on time and patience, I will try to translate for you. From what I can tell, the Half Past Human Report, and a few other related websites, are places where people who believe in the power of the internet to predict the future gather to trade predictions and theories. Another site sums it up better than I could:

Originally designed to track stock market trends, the Web Bot uses a system of spiders that crawl the Internet looking for patterns of behavior, trends and chatter pertaining to coming events. This tool is believed to be able to forecast the future by tapping into the collective unconscious of society.

These sites claim that web bots predicted the anthrax attacks, the 2004 Tsunami, and 9/11. Maybe they did, but I just didn’t have the patience to scan through the web bot archives to see for myself, so I’m just going to take their word for it.

Naturally, the people who follow these web bot predictions attempted to figure out the identity of this “dog poet” Messiah. Since my blog is the first site to come up on Google when searching under those two words, many of the Half Past Humans have stumbled across ME!

They discussed this turn of events on password-protected forums, where someone posted a link to my blog:

“We are all doomed,” said one.

“I don’t think hundreds of people will go for the stuff this guy is peddling, let alone billions,” said another.

Now, the Manly Fireplug would be excited to see that people actually thought I was “peddling” stuff here, since he thinks I could stand to do a little more self-promotion. But I will say, for the record, that yes, missy, a few hundred people – maybe even a FEW THOUSAND – stop by here regularly for the stuff I peddle.

I have no idea what the future portends. And I have no idea if I will be doing anything noteworthy this winter, let alone next spring, or if a billion people will take notice. But I do hope to finish my book by then and yes: you are all doomed.

The gay gods have punished me and my vanity in the worst manner possible, saddling me with a low-grade yet persistent flu bug for the past three weeks. Which means no gym time before one of the High Holy days of gay San Francisco Summer, Dore Alley, at which I will be bartending, more or less with the expectation that I will do so shirtless. Oh, the humanity.

I know, I know, my blog has fallen under neglect and disrepair. But I’m not one of these writers who stay productive while reclining in a sick bed. Unless you count compulsively surfing the “Watch Instantly” feature on Netflix a productive use of time.

So let me toss out the regular reminder of the next Barbershop Reading Series event, after which I will rest up for slinging drinks. No doubt I will see a few of you perverts out this weekend.

Please join us for the next event in the Barbershop Reading Series. Playing off the atmosphere of a community barbershop, our events feature live literary readings paired with musical performances.

Our August 1st event will feature readings by a husband-and-wife pair of poets:

OSCAR BERMEO is the author of the poetry chapbooks Anywhere Avenue, Palimpsest and Heaven Below. Recent poems appear in BorderSenses, In the Grove and Spindle, among others. Oscar is a BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own), IWL (Intergenerational Writers Lab) and VONA (Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation) poetry fellow. He lives in Oakland with his wife, poeta Barbara Jane Reyes.

BARBARA JANE REYES is an adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at USF. Her work has been published in Asian Pacific American Journal, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Parthenon West Review, and elsewhere. Barbara is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago, 2003), and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book, Diwata, is forthcoming in 2010 from BOA Editions. She reviews small press books by Asian Pacific Islander American authors for Hyphen magazine’s blog.

Also reading will be BRENT FLUTY, a member of the Barbershop Writing Group, a workshop running in conjunction with the Barbershop Reading Series and led by series host Michael McAllister. Click here for more info on the Barbershop Writing Group. Brent graduated from University of Oklahoma with a B.A. in Geography with focus on Latin American studies. He is a Gardener by profession, who writes in his off time

Our musical guest will be San Francisco-based singer-songwriter TERESE TAYLOR. The Village Voice said of Taylor: “She can veer from lonely backwoods laments to precise, grinding Mission Of Burma-like instrumentals and back. Her music is intuitive and mysterious, filled with personal in-jokes and painful memories, a puzzle that is meant to be felt and experienced, not solved.”

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)

Our first two events played to full houses, so we suggest arriving early, especially if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs.

Saturday, August 1st, at 8 pm
SUGGESTED donation: $5 (everyone welcome)

That donation helps to cover our expenses and buys you highly addictive Kettle Salt and Pepper potato chips, baked goods, cold beer, and a Diet Coke or two.

We can always use volunteers to help set up and clean up afterward. Volunteers pay no cover and earn good karma. If interested, email Michael McAllister.

Not too long ago I told you about my Facebook Scrabble obsession. Like most of my obsessions it flamed out after three or four weeks of compulsivity, three or four weeks where I had twenty games playing simultaneously with both friends and strangers, three or four weeks in which I rose in the publicly-displayed rankings; out of 400 friends, I placed second or third, depending on the day, an achievement that I will admit warmed my blood.

I have over 400 Facebook friends partly because I have my profile linked to the front page of this blog, and partly due to my low standards. One of these recent guys I’d never met, but I accepted his friend request nonetheless, and soon after he sent me an online invite to a Scrabble game. Yes, okay, I checked his ranking, which I found less than threatening. We started to play.

Now, I’ve played the real, in-person Scrabble many times over the years, usually with my dad, who retired after thirty years as an editor and who has consistently kicked my ass in each and every game, save the one we played when we last saw each other, when I added an R to his “TORQUE,” hitting the triple word square and sending me into paroxysms of poor-winner fist pumping.

In all the years we’ve played, I’ve only once seen Dad play a word using all seven letters. This move nets the player an additional 50 points, and catapults them to near-certain victory. So when this new “friend” played two seven-letter words in a row, my hackles raised.

You can’t cheat in face-to-face Scrabble, but online is a different story. Anyone, in the privacy of their home, can check a word in the dictionary. This cheat I will admit to using, but the second, more insidious form of cheating I try to avoid, for ethical reasons. The second form of cheating is the online word generator. Type in your given letters, and a split second later the generator spits out a list of possible words, 90% of which you could go your whole life never once hearing used in conversation.

I was willing to concede to my “friend” the first word he played, “FOUNDED.” But then he played “ATEMOYA.” I gave the screen the finger, but by now it was too late. If I tried to delete the game, it would count as a “loss” and my ranking would suffer. I had the suspicion that he’d targeted me for just that reason, but then I am prone to moments of grandiosity.

I decided that if I was going to lose, then at least I’d go down fighting. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, I held back from accusing him and instead played the word “PHONIES.”

Then he really started spewing out the bullshit. “GLEEK,” BRIARY,” “AVOSET,” he played. In the end I lost by thirty-five points, and my Scrabble obsession came to an end.

A couple of days later he sent me another invite. “Hey sexy! How about a rematch?”

In most cases, when someone calls me sexy I will do whatever they want. Call it a moral blind spot. Curious, I clicked on the link which took me to the game. He’d played the first word, “CHUKARS.”

“You know,” I typed back. “I’ve got so many things on my plate right now. Don’t have time for Scrabble.”

“I hear you,” he replied. “I’m really busy too.”

Busy being a seven-letter whore, maybe. I ignored the game, and a few days later he tried to FORCE FORFEIT ME. Now, when you FORCE FORFEIT ME, you give me another loss, and that loss pulls down my ranking. I deleted the game.

Two days later: “Hey gorgeous, how about another game??”

I went to his profile and clicked “REMOVE,” whispering to his smarmy grin, “Bitch, don’t mess with my ranking.”

“Oh my God,” I said, paging through The New Yorker, “a friend of mine has a poem published in here!”

“In The New Yorker?” asked the Manly Fireplug’s roommate.

“Yeah. Well, he’s not really a friend so much as a guy I know.”

“If he’s published in The New Yorker then he’s a friend now.”

I read the poem. “Oh my God! I know everyone in this poem. Including the bulldog!”

But it must be a different bulldog by now. I hadn’t hung out with the poet’s brother since 1990, in Minneapolis, the summer after my first year of college, the summer after I’d come out of the closet.

“I know his brother. Or knew his brother. I’m not sure where he is now, but that summer he used to vogue in the passenger seat of my car, smoking Marlboro reds. His mother thought I was a bad influence on him.”

“You are a bad influence.”

“I know. Everything I touch turns gay.”

The roommate turned back to Playstation 3.

“Have you found the plasma rifle yet?” I asked.

So today at Gold’s I ran into the nurse who was working in the ER the night my lung collapsed. I thanked him for treating me so well that night. He had been funny, and flirtatious, but in a manner that had only calmed my dull, sedated panic. He had showed the Manly Fireplug my x-rays before the procedure, and a couple of days later stopped by the barbershop to ask about my recovery.

I told him that the procedure unfortunately hadn’t worked so well, as I ended up back in the hospital a couple of days later, only to get a second tube shoved through my chest. Fortunately I was even more sedated for that one.

“Yeah,” he said. “I told Doctor O’Brien that I was a little worried. That needle was only three and a half inches long, those aren’t really made for guys who have chests as big as yours.”

I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear that. My work here is done.

So here are the top three phrases that people typed into Google yesterday that brought them to my site:

1. dogpoet.com

2. dogpoet

3. why hairy chests

Anyone care to answer?

“This is for the vodka tonic,” says the man, handing me a five. Then he throws another one on the bar. “And this is for forgetting to put your shirt on.”

Who has bigger muscles than everybody else but who breathes through his mouth and takes little “breaks” throughout class to gulp water and “re-center” his thoughts (i.e. admire his own arms in the mirror) while everybody around him is upside down balanced on one leg for like four fucking minutes.