When you grow up with someone who likes to throw back a few drinks, there’s a voice that can stick with you longer than you’d like. It’s the voice that slips up to you in the middle of the night, sits on the edge of your bed and hisses at you with clenched teeth. It rages over the sound of the television, echoes and thumps through a locked door. A voice tossed at you in the backseat of car. The words sometimes change but the point’s always the same: you won’t amount to shit in this life.

After a few glasses of wine that voice sometimes came out of my mom, out of the same woman who loved me and told me I could be anything I wanted. The same woman who “got” me more than anyone else, as Moms sometimes do. She pushed me hard. One day in grade school I came home with a 97 on an English test. “What happened to the other three points?” she asked, without a trace of humor. Still, she and my dad raised me with the expectation that I would make my way to college, and on to good things, in a good life.

That these two voices came from the same woman confused me as a kid, turned me wary and watchful, measuring the heat in every room. Hear it at the wrong time, when you’re too young to know yourself, too young not to believe what others call you, and it works its way into your marrow, growing up with you, hobbling you, lowering your aim in life.

The voice can’t be reasoned with. You can’t show it the proof of your past deeds, your honors and awards. Other people can’t argue it out of your bones. It feeds off the same stuff as nightmares, hiding where the light can’t hit it, growing up twisted and gnarled, wrapping itself around the stronger parts of you.

Later on, I grew up to be a guy who liked to toss back a few, and I heard that voice coming out of me, aimed at someone I loved, and after a while I couldn’t live with it anymore.

I’ve been thinking about that voice lately, as I work away at a couple of projects, the kinds of projects that voice kept me from trying, and though I hear it every day, hissing at me with those stupid clenched teeth (it has no sense of humor, this voice), it’s not working like it used to. You can’t reason with the voice. You can’t outthink it. But you can get to work, acting like it’s not there, whistling like a seventh dwarf, your bones strong and pure.

Sun on the back deck
Coffee in my Grumpy mug
Puppy vomit on my bedspread
Yawn….wait…wtf?!?

• Drinking coffee from my Grumpy mug. #

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Question typed into Google: “Does humping a pillow at eleven years old lead to an early sex life?”

Answer: Yes.

- Slow leak in front left tire: patch or fork over for new ones?

- Find a few dozen chairs for reading series, priced cheap. *cough*

- Partner up with Books, Inc to sell books at the reading series

- Do we need a microphone?

- Find last reader for first reading series event

- Send out two-week warning for Barbershop Writing Group: three spots left

- Keep working on the Group’s curriculum

- Give feedback on friend’s beautiful new novel manuscript

- Fast-forward through American Idol to get to Adam Lambert

- Draft seven of memoir: Figure out how to make soap opera of freshman year college less of a soap opera. On the page, if not in memory.

- Stop eating Easter candy at midnight

- More. Cardio.

- Warn people about possible dogpoet downtime while upgrading to latest version of Wordpress

- Conquer world. Use new powers to find a cabin in the woods where you can’t even see the neighbors

Nothing is too sacred to my brother, and that is one of the reasons I love him. Here he is posing with my niece, Mallory, outside a fire station while visiting me in San Francisco. Lest you think I pressured him into it, I’m telling you now, it was his idea. Poor Mallory. She thinks the pink bear outfit will save her.

“Sorry that took so long,” the dog groomer said as she snipped a stray hair off Finley’s now-sleek coat. “He was furrier than I thought he was.”

“No prob,” I said. It was hard finding someone who could do a Norwich Terrier coat, and I wasn’t about to risk my standing with her by complaining. Plus I’m from Minnesota. We don’t complain, we just let our resentments simmer for eight or nine years.

“But he looks fabulous now,” she said. “He’s got a nice coat. And he’s got a really nice body.”

“Thank you,” I said, as if I something to do with it. As if I spotted him at the gym a few times a week. It was the kind of compliment every gay man would like to hear about their dog, projecting his own needs upon his companion. My dog has a nice little body. My dog could do porn.

Finley didn’t look like he cared much about compliments at that particular moment. “Get me the fuck out of here,” he implored me with his big brown eyes. “Or tonight while you sleep I will chew out your throat.”

“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.

I sort of forgot/was too unduly humble to mention that our new reading series got a write-up on a site dedicated to book publicists and other publishing professionals. In case anyone is interested, here is an excerpt:

* * *
There’s a new show in town, and publicists and authors will want to pay extra attention to this. Michael McAllister, a recent Columbia MFA graduate, has returned to the Bay Area and is launching The Barbershop: A Reading Series at his partner’s barbershop in the Castro this May. Readings will be held on the first Saturday of each month at 8 pm at the newly renovated, modern but retro Joe’s Barbershop at 2150 Market Street.

“The location is both comfortable and a little irreverent, and I think people will enjoy it,” says Michael. “Not to mention the fact that there won’t be any espresso machines frothing milk in the middle of your reading.”

A man of many trades—Michael has worked as a bartender, bike messenger, and a research assistant during grad school to author Brad Gooch—the idea for the series came to him via the book club he attends. “Our book club has remained strong after two years because we really need each other,” he explained. “We need to get out of our offices and out of our heads, and sometimes talk shop and laugh and gossip for a while. Writing can be incredibly lonely, and you can go years without feedback on your work.”

Michael’s goal is to bring the same kind of energy he experiences at book club meetings to the series, especially for writers who are looking for alternative reading opportunities on book tours through San Francisco. “I want to provide another place for writers and readers to meet and discuss literature,” he says, and points out how most readings seem to be held at bars, bookstores, and coffee shops. The Barbershop Reading Series is the kind of location that could really stick in one’s memory for being unusual. Though he’d like to set the bar high for the kind of literary fiction and non-fiction he’s seeking, the atmosphere would remain casual and welcoming, with a typical “barbershop feel.”

* * *
You can read more of the article here.

So I racked up another birthday Sunday, edging one step closer to The Gay Death That is 40 Unless You Start Calling Yourself A Daddy And Even Then Your Options Are Limited. I made myself feel better by pooling my Christmas and birthday gift funds and buying myself a Kindle 2. I know, I know. They’re not the same as books, and I’m essentially hammering another nail in the coffin of bookstores everywhere. But I held out on cell phones for a long time, and, well, the essence of life is change. Electronic readers are probably the future of reading, and I figured the sooner I made peace with it, the better.

I downloaded the new Cheever biography in less than a minute, a couple of sample chapters from the new Toni Morrison and Joseph O’Neil novels, and transferred four Word documents to the contraption, all of which I heartily enjoyed perusing on the stationary bike at the gym, simply because I didn’t have to hold a book open. Hands-free reading! This is why making deals with the devil always feels like fun.

Speaking of fun little contraptions, the Manly Fireplug bought me the hottest little lunchbox EVER for my birthday.  The Mr. Bento box has four separate containers, an insulated shell, and a carrying bag. Today I brought rice, pork, sauce, and zucchini to the office, each in its own little container. Those Japanese think of everything. Not to mention its aesthetically appealing shape. You too could have a little manly fireplug in your life.

Of course the problem with edging closer to The Gay Death That is 40 is that my mind continues to deteriorate at an alarming rate. I’ve forgotten both of my little contraptions at horribly inopportune places and times. I don’t know how we are supposed to cope. Between the cell phone, the laptop, the iPod, the wallet, the keys, the glasses, the books, the pens, Wordpress, Twitter, Facebook, and Big Muscle Bear, my brain has splintered apart, never to be fully integrated again. I now understand why J.D. Salinger recused himself from society after writing A Catcher in the Rye. He saved himself the hassle of maintaining seventy-three internet profiles. Not to mention the hell of cocktail parties.