But all things considered a little recent silence makes sense. No easy way to say it; after three and a half years together the Manly Fireplug and I decided last week to end our relationship. We started out as friends, several years before, and we both feel that might have been a better fit for our very different personalities. And that’s all I’m going to say about the reasons why. Some things aren’t meant for internet consumption.

And after the decision comes regret, relief, second thoughts, sleepless nights, skipped meals, reheated meals, meals picked up from a drive-thru window. An overwhelming urge to hide. Friends and families to inform. Desktop photos to change. Bad TV and Playstation 3. Sad songs in the car on repeat. A disappointed dog. The many ties to disentangle. Occasional conversations with very hot boys that only make clear what you’ve just given up. The break-up is about as amicable as one could hope but as a friend put it, amicable doesn’t mean easy.

With him I saw Philadelphia, Tahoe, Palm Springs, and Minneapolis. We slept in a hotel in Los Angeles. We ate at shrimp shacks on Oahu and noodle shops in Japantown. We bought Carhartt shirts in Manhattan and sun tan lotion on the Jersey Shore. We walked the manicured streets of Disneyworld and drove the narrow roads of Ireland.

He taught me confidence. He taught me to pay people more compliments. To hold apologies for only those things that require apologies. To take pride in what I’ve accomplished. To be more forgiving of my family. To ask for the kind of sex I’ve always wanted. He saw the best and the worst in me. He charmed my friends and my fathers and he cut my hair every damn week for free. He sat beside me in the ER when my lung collapsed. He never asked me to give it all up for a normal job. He urged me to finish the book, and with his support I did.

“I’m glad we tried,” I told him.

“We would have been crazy not to,” he replied.

I’m not very sociable. No good at cocktail parties. But I spent an entire week with the Manly Fireplug’s enormous, garrulous, and enormously garrulous Irish Catholic clan. Not one of them is an introvert. All of them love to talk. Nonstop. At high volume. At the same time. Get eighteen of them in a room, feed them booze and turkey, and measure the oncoming decibels. I now refer to them, collectively, as THE WALL OF SOUND.

Since I rejuice my batteries by hanging out alone most days, a full week of the WALL OF SOUND was a psychological experiment which my brain more or less failed by the fourth day. That night we went to the Fireplug’s 30th high school reunion, where I attempted to make small talk and act the charming trophy husband for three hours, all without the aid of seven shots of Jack Daniels. By the end I could only offer the same three or four sentences to each schoolmate, one of those sentences being, naturally, “Have a Merry Christmas.”

Day seven my motherboard shorted out completely, and I sat quietly drooling at brunch with THE WALL OF SOUND. Fortunately this was the kind of high class all-you-can-eat buffet type brunch, where everything looked like it was made on Top Chef, and so I just stumbled like a zombie from pork belly to paté to pineapple bursts without drawing too much attention to myself.

The Fireplug read my book on the plane, there and back. I hadn’t let anyone read it in two years. Just a few more small changes and I’ll let a few others read it too. So friggin’ close now, after 5-7 years of toiling over the damn thing, depending on your definition of starting point. Hopefully after a couple of days of solitude my brain will work again. If not the Fireplug can just stick me in a nursing home and sell my book to pay the bills. Or at least next month’s gas bill.

Our full line-up:

JIM PROVENZANO’S résumé reads like the history of gay media since the 1980s, mixed with that of a typical dancer- actor-waiter -stage carpenter-wrestler- dot-com survivor. His 1999 debut novel PINS also became a successful play. He’s penned two more novels – MONKEY SUITS and CYCLIZEN – and short fiction for a few dozen anthologies. The former nationally syndicated sports columnist also curated and designed the world’s first exhibit about LGBT athletes. He recently returned to writing and editing at the Bay Area Reporter, where he often considers starting a “How to Write a Press Release” Boot Camp.

HELENE WECKER will be reading from her novel in progress, THE GOLEM AND THE DJINNI. Helene received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York. After a dozen years of moving around between both coasts and the Midwest, she is finally settling down in the East Bay, where she lives with her husband and works an increasingly odd series of freelance gigs. You can find her online at www.helenewecker.com.

MEGAN KEELY is a local singer-songwriter, homegrown here in the Bay Area. She plays with an everchanging roster, often including her father and brother, but can be found playing solo shows here and there with her banjolele and various other small musical instruments. Megan loves any opportunity to play in atypical venues, including woodshops, plant nurseries, and of course barbershops. Every day she is awed and inspired by the incredible, the improbable, and the impossible.

HOLLY PAYNE is a novelist, screenwriter and writing coach who serves on the faculty of the MFA writing program at California College of the Arts. She is the author of THE VIRGIN’S KNOT (a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book) and THE SOUND OF BLUE. Her latest novel, KINGDOM OF SIMPLICITY, set in her native Amish Country, was written as a response to a drunk driver who left her unable to walk for nearly a year. She has lived and worked in Hungary, Turkey, England and Croatia and continues to travel the world to research her stories. She is the founder of Skywriter Series writing workshops and Skywriter Ranch, a summer writing retreat held annually in the Rocky Mountains and is currently at work on a new book of historical fiction set in medieval Europe.

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)
Saturday, December 5th, at 8 pm.

We suggest arriving early if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs. Other seating, without footrests or armrest ashtrays, will be available.

Our awesome bookselling parter in crime, BOOKS, INC will be on hand with copies of our featured author’s books. Buy one or three and get them autographed.

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

Our lineup:

ROB ROSEN will be reading from his brand-new novel DIVAS LAS VEGAS, which one reviewer called a “cheerfully cheeky romp through the boys and beds of Las Vegas…Fierce sexy slapstick.” Rosen is the author of Sparkle: The Queerest Book You’ll Ever Love and has contributed to over sixty anthologies including Cleis Press’s Truckers, Best Gay Romance, Best Gay Romance 2008, Best Gay Romance 2009, Best Gay Erotica 2009, Hard Hats, Backdraft, Surfer Boys, and Bears. His erotica is often found in MEN and Freshmen magazines. He lives in San Francisco with his husband, Kenny, and you can find him online at www.therobrosen.com.

In addition to its usual roster of excellent and experienced authors, The Barbershop is committed to presenting the fresh voices of emerging writers. JOSHUA KLIPP is a transgender artist primarily known as a singer/songwriter who’s been featured on the Tyra Banks Show and MTV’s LOGO, and in 2008 he hit the Billboard Dance Charts. As one of the L WORD producers put it, “He makes every gender swoon!” He debuted his literary skills at the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival’s “Transforming Community”, and is currently working on a book of essays titled, THIRD PERSON. Check him out online at www.joshuaklipp.com.

SHANTHI SEKARAN will be reading from her first novel, THE PRAYER ROOM. She was born and raised in California, and now splits her time between Berkeley and London. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, she was first published in Best New American Voices 2004 (Harcourt). Of THE PRAYER ROOM, the New York Times said, “Sekaran is a master of cadence, and as she displays her intimate knowledge of India, England and America, there’s jazz on nearly every page.” You can find her online at www.shanthisekaran.com.

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)
Saturday, November 7th, at 8 pm.

We suggest arriving early if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs. Other seating, without footrests or armrest ashtrays, is available.

Our awesome bookselling parter in crime, BOOKS, INC will be on hand with copies of our featured author’s books. Buy one or three and get them autographed.

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

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.

I am hiding in the desert, staying in my gay dads’ empty condo in Palm Springs, where the 1984 International Male catalog models have all retired and let themselves go. I am finishing up a two-week stay, revising and polishing my book in relative solitude, though I do drag myself to the gym  occasionally to keep up appearances.

After a couple of work-outs I’ve realized that there are a few qualities that act, for me, as immediate disqualifications in matters of sexual attraction:

1. Frosted hair on any guy over the age of 22. Scratch that, frosted hair on any guy period.

2. Fine-mesh tank tops, which haven’t aged well since the 1984 International Male Catalog.

3. An enormous, deeply-tanned bicep around which is strapped a tiny pink iPod.

However, if you can leave the house sporting ALL OF THE ABOVE, then you have bigger ones than I could ever dream of growing.

I’ve been talking about this damn book for several years now, and I realize I’ve tested the patience of many friend, reader, and family member. I wish I were faster than I am. But I just can’t compromise on this thing. It has to be as great as I can possibly make it. Fortunately I’ve worked my ass off here in the desert, revising 200 pages in two days. I think of the thing like a diamond necklace or something; each scene, each section, needs to be finely polished. But the whole thing needs to hang together real pretty too. I’m trying to cover thirty years of a family, and I have a whole lot more respect now for anyone that can even bang out a coherent book-length narrative, let alone a really good one.

I worry that I’m piling all of my eggs into this tiny, unpredictably-constructed basket. And that if I fail at this I will have nothing else to show for my life. Not that I’m ever, like, melodramatic or anything.

Two weeks is the longest that the Manly Fireplug and I have ever spent apart, and I sense a combustible reunion when he comes down to retrieve me on Sunday. An explosion at the end of the tunnel, and all that. I would happily share the details with you, but thanks to local lit man Kemble Scott, my blog is now listed in the San Francisco Bay section of the New York Times, and I have to consider these new readers’ delicate constitutions.

]]> http://www.dogpoet.com/blog/archives/953/feed 7 http://www.dogpoet.com/blog/archives/916 http://www.dogpoet.com/blog/archives/916#comments Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:25:38 +0000 dogpoet http://www.dogpoet.com/blog/?p=916

Please join us for an exceptionally scary event, a joint production between The Barbershop and Litquake, San Francisco’s annual literary festival, now celebrating its Tenth Year.

BE AFRAID!
Evil Queens, Menacing Dykes, and Secret Gay Agendas
From lurid pulp novels to YouTube sermons, America’s fear of the gay menace still runs strong. They could be your neighbors or your children’s teachers. They could be lurking in your locker rooms and your foxholes, moving, one step at a time, closer to world domination. Are these just crazy conspiracies, or is there something real to fear about the shadowy queens and dykes forced to skulk at the edges of society?

Our full lineup:

Meliza Bañales is the author of SAY IT WITH YOUR WHOLE MOUTH. The first West Coast Latina to win a poetry slam championship in 2002, she has toured with Sister Spit and Body Heat. She won an AIRspace residency for her one-woman-show, ONE BAD YEAR, which ended its run at the 2009 SF Fringe Festival. She was awarded a 2008 Creating Queer Community Grant, and a 2006 Frameline Completion Grant for the film DO THE MATH, with Mary Guzman. She is currently working on her second collection, 51 POEMS ABOUT NOTHING AT ALL.

Justin Chin is an award-winning spoken word/performance artist and the author of three poetry collections, all published by Manic D Press: GUTTED – which received the 2007 Thom Gunn Award for Poetry by the Publishing Triangle – HARMLESS MEDICINE, and BITE HARD, as well as the essay collections BURDEN OF ASHES and MONGREL: ESSAYS, DIATRIBES, and PRANKS.

Marcus Ewert wrote the groundbreaking children’s book 10,000 DRESSES, gorgeously illustrated by Rex Ray. He is currently working on still more kids’ books, plus a memoir about his real-life affair with William Burroughs. He is also an actor and director, and cocreated the hit animated series, Piki & Poko, Adventures in StarLand, currently being shown on MTV’s LOGO channel. He has appeared in the Gus Van Sant short film Four Naked Boys and a Gun, in Sadie Benning’s Flat Is Beautiful, and the movie Frisk by Todd Verow. In 2008, he starred in the feature film The Lollipop Generation by G.B. Jones.

Justin Hall is an award-winning comic book creator and world traveler best known for his series TRUE TRAVEL TALES, HARD TO SWALLOW, and GLAMAZONIA THE UNCANNY SUPERTRANNY. His work has appeared in the Best American Comics and the S.F. Guardian, among others, and he has appeared at the San Diego Comic Con, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and the Tom of Finland Erotic Arts Fair. He recently read at the local Smack Dab Reading Series. You can find him online at All Thumbs Press.

Monica Nolan is the author of THE BIG BOOK OF LESBIAN HORSE STORIES (co-written with Alisa Surkis) and LOIS LENZ, LESBIAN SECRETARY. Her next book, BOBBY BLANCHARD, LESBIAN GYM TEACHERS, will be out in 2010. Her films include Ashley, 22, Chuckie or Ben-Hur in Five Minutes, World of Women, and Lesbians Who Date Men. She has taught film at San Francisco State University, and the Film Arts Forum.

Aaron Shurin is the author of KING OF SHADOWS, a collection of personal essays published by City Lights Books in 2008. He began publishing in the gay press in 1971, and is currently a professor in the MFA in Writing Program at USF. He has received California Arts Council Literary Fellowships in Poetry and an NEA fellowship in creative nonfiction. His book PARADISE OF FORMS: SELECTED POEMS was chosen as one of Publisher Weekly’s Best Books of 1999.

Details:

Joe’s Barbershop
2150 Market St (between Church and Sanchez)
Saturday, October 10th, at 8 pm.

We suggest arriving early, especially for this event, and especially if you want to kick back in one of the barber chairs.

Our awesome bookselling parter in crime, BOOKS, INC will be on hand with copies of our featured author’s books. Buy one or three and get them autographed.

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.

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.

One of the things I love about the Manly Fireplug is that he is not only willing to ride ALL of the scariest rides at an amusement park, several times, but he is also willing to wait longer in order to GET THE FRONT CAR.

We’d planned on visiting the Spam Museum in Austin, MN, but traffic on 35S was looking a little miserable, so we hopped over to Shakopee and visited Valleyfair instead. Shakopee, for those in the know, is also home to the first challenge winner on this season of Project Runway. Who knew?

I grew up going to Valleyfair every summer, so I was feeling nostalgic. Plus I got to eat one of my three to five alloted corn dogs per year.

We were back in Minneapolis for my 20-Year High School Reunion, which turned out to be sort of an awkward event, with everyone getting REALLY drunk and dancing THE BIRD in unison.

I actually did not detest high school; at least not junior and senior years, when I had a pretty cool circle of friends. As a sign of how cool they still are, they have formed an all-girl Clash tribute band. Fortunately, after the liquored debauchery of the reunion, my friends invited the Fireplug and me to a dinner party the next night, and that made my entire trip. Valleyfair was icing.

The Fireplug’s 30-Yeah High School Reunion is in November, at which I will be the trophy boy!

Also: just finished draft seven of my book. A couple more quick drafts and I hope to start showing it to people.