the guttermorality of homewrecking

i'm not put off by it anymore--i know by now that when he rolls away from me and faces the wall afterwards, it's nothing personal, and that within five minutes or so or whenever it passes, he'll look back over his shoulder with that sheepish smile that just kills me, roll back into the crook of my arm, and we'll talk.

for the longest time it was just generalized post-coital catholic-boy guilt that caused him to do that, but now it's something more specific.  because now he's dating someone--the first guy he's felt something for in a long time.  he's closed his adam account, but he can't figure out why he still needs to keep me (and who knows, maybe one or two others) on rotation.

i ask to see pictures, he grabs his phone, shows me proudly.  guy looks like matt in his prime (either leblanc or dillon, depending on the angle), so god knows looks aren't the problem--i can only imagine the visual these two make as a couple.

i ask him if the guy's withholding and cool, but no--just the opposite.  he's apparently crazy about him, calls and texts him all the time, so affection's not the problem, either.

i ask him if it's the sex, and he says no--it's really good too (i almost ask if it's as good as with me, but stop myself in time).

i know his history--large, close family in mexico, came to LA at 21, met and fell hard for a player, got hurt bad, rebounded into the fast lane, danced and then tended bar at one of the most raging watering holes in weho, met lots of people, got into trouble, came out the other side ok.  now, at 32 and past his weho prime, he's grounded and sane, and still sweet and sexy as hell.  but he tells me he's not the same as he was.

i ask him, "you ever even think about cheating on your first boyfriend, the one you were so crazy about?"  nah, he never even looked at anybody else.

"so what happened between the first one and this one?"  we both know:  weho happened, that's what.

"you think you could be happy in a monogamous relationship at this point?"  he doesn't know--he thinks so, except for when he gets that itch.

"how about him--you think he's seeing anybody on the side?"  he looks away quickly, which answers that question.

"look, you want this to work or not?"  yeah, he thinks he does--he's been lonely a long time.

"then you know what you have to do."  yeah, i guess.

over the months i've known him, i've loved every minute of my time with this boy.  damn shame i have to give him up.

sober update:  sorry about this one, folks--they can't all be winners, right?  i was having a cocktail and waxing a little sentimental last night, but all i really meant to say here was this:  i'm no saint mkf--far from it.  i'll fuck you and your boyfriend too, but only if you're unconflicted about it, and the damage, if any, has already been done.  will this boy be able to make a go of it with his matt dillon-leblanc?  i dunno--i hope so, for his sake--but if not, it won't be because of me.

my magic wand opens many doors

so tonight i'm doing a little mild surfing of one of my favored hookup sites preparatory to heading off to bed, and, there amongst the tired regulars, i spot a fresh new face.

what's extra-adorable about this 24-year-old's profile is that he's got it all done up in a harry potter motif, which totally complements his insistence that, unlike all us depraved sex pigs, he's new to the game and is just looking to chat and make friends.

uh-huh.

so, consistent with my duties as self-appointed welcoming committee for the newbies, i fire off a quick, friendly email warning him that no one on the site is to be trusted but me, and move on.  (this little gambit is generally ignored about 90% of the time, but i persist because it's the 10% who reply that keeps things interesting--god, i really should be an insurance salesman.)

this one hits me back, we chat innocently a few minutes, and, outta several face pics i keep on hand, i text him the one i figure will most closely fit his needs, and the following exchange occurs:

yeah, looming over him.

and outta the mouth of this babe in his lil' dumbledore t-shirt, here it comes, pretty much as i'd expected:

he's far away so he probably won't, and if he does we won't do most of the above, but it just goes to show that when it comes to boys these days, a top who's been around can almost always can judge a book by its cover.

and really, i should probably stop bitching about the decline of the american family and thank the sexual revolution for sending all these lost, daddyless boys my way.

but i can't quite bring myself to do it.

the guttermorality case for religion, part 2

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[this started out as a response to comments made to the previous post, but then i figured, why bury it way down there where only, like, two people will see it?  so it became its own post; this way, four people will see it.]



when i posted the first part of this thread the other night, i figured it would be good for a response from each of my two most faithful commenters, and in that i wasn't disappointed.  one, predictably, took the high road, while the other, also predictably, went for the jugular (in the most loving and constructive way possible, of course), but both responded pretty much as i expected they would.

let's start with will:

With a due respect to Mr.Vonnegut, I think Science shoots down a few more -- in fact many more -- things in the bible; virgin birth, walking on water, feeding thousands from enough food to be held in just two hands, and bodies being taken up into the sky. There's lots more also.

you take mr. vonnegut too literally;  the examples he used, i think, were meant to represent the whole of religious mythology.  what i take his quote to mean (and the reason i used it) is that, even if you strip away all the fairy tales, the basic tenets of most faiths hold up remarkably well.

I stand on the side of being an atheist and secular humanist who raised two adopted Korean orphan daughters as a single gay father and saw them turn out to be literate, honest, civic-minded and generous human beings of whom any culture would be proud.

will, one of the things you tend to do when refuting one of my sweeping pronouncements is use yourself as an example of why i'm wrong, as if you are in any way typical of the mass of grubby humanity.  i assure you, you are not.

I do not personally believe that religion is needed to be a moral, principled person.

nor do i, a fact i made clear in the post.  but i do believe that if one lacks either the benefit of a religious upbringing as a basis for one's moral and philosophical grounding or a strong association with those who have, then in order to achieve the secular equivalent, one would have to be either classically educated, or a serious autodidact.  unfortunately, the vast majority of people today are neither of those things.

In fact, given organized religion's track record, I think it isn't a help but a hindrance to that goal.

here, i think you're guilty of the sorta broad-brush stereotyping and bigotry that would horrify you if it were applied by a conservative to, say, transgenders or racial minorities.  i could, for instance, drown you in all kinds of statistics showing that poor religious people donate a far greater portion of their worldly goods to charity than do rich secular humanists, or that people of strong faith tend to lead longer, more satisfying lives than nonbelievers.

i understand the gist of your argument, though.  i started questioning the validity of christianity in early adolescence, about the time my developing critical faculties made it impossible to overlook the contradiction of importuning a god who had preordained everything already.  the final nail in the coffin of my faith was driven the day i half-heartedly tried to explain the whole jesus virgin-birth-and-resurrection thing to an incredulous jewish classmate--the words coming outta my mouth sounded as hollow and stupid to me as they obviously did to her.

and god knows organized religion is in many ways a mess; when you raise men to power over other men in any institution, be it religion or government, corruption of the original idea is inevitable.  but even with all of religion's evils, in no way do i think the world would be better without it.


now, on to noblesavage:

I have always thought it odd that you have this moralistic streak that borders on the puritanical...it just seems so out of place with, well, what you do much of the time.

in case you hadn't noticed, captain obvious, exploring that contradiction is the point of this whole goddam blog (see masthead).

It is also out of synch with your libertarianism. But, then again, you lurch to the right on numerous topics including global warming, so perhaps you are at home with the morality police -- if only they do not get to know you too well.

"morality police"--how the hell did you get that outta what i wrote?  lemme tell you what i believe, noblesavage.  i believe that for any group of people to have any hope of creating and maintaining a free and just society, three things are necessary:  (1) a strong family and community structure, (2) an enlightened, educated populace, and (3) a common, agreed-upon code of conduct.  i further believe that, to the degree a given society has pulled off those three things, relatively little policing, moral or otherwise, is necessary.

america today?  between the sexual revolution, the advent of birth control, the rise of the internet and inflation eliminating the one-income family, we've pretty much decimated (1), the powers-that-be in concert with the teachers' unions have effectively destroyed any hope of (2), and the cults of multiculturalism and political correctness have pretty much dealt the death blow to (3).

you don't believe me?  take off your rose-colored glasses and look around you:  while the 1% systematically steal everything that's not nailed down right under our dumb, oblivious noses, we occupy ourselves with rioting over sneakers, sending our third-graders off to school to orally copulate one another, and dismantling our infrastructure to sell for scrap.

if you can't see how drastically society has deteriorated over the course of your lifetime--i mean, people are routinely doing things today we couldn't have conceived of in our worst nightmares 40 years ago--while at the same time our individual freedoms are being stripped from us daily (in order to "protect" us), then no amount of blathering by yours truly is ever gonna open your eyes to the truth.

Most religious denominations give you a built-in ready to wear moral code. That is true.

which is the whole point of my post.  the moral codes of most of the world's religions (scientology and a few others excepted) weren't randomly whipped up overnight by a cabal of puritanical buzzkillers; on the contrary, they evolved over the millennia as a tried-and-true way to moderate the foibles of human nature, and thus allow people to live together in relative harmony.

without the foundation of a "built-in ready to wear moral code", most people just make it up as they go along, which is pretty much why we are where we are today.

In any case, I don't see you ever going to church, so I guess you just like the idea of it in the abstract...or think it is good for people who need it and you don't need it -- but everyone else does.

i did my time in sunday school, and it served its purpose--it gave me a well-developed conscience, a pretty thorough grounding in the concepts of right and wrong, and an ideal way of living to measure against the way i actually conduct my life.  which is probably one of the reasons i drink.

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that's it--another one in the can.  and now that i've finished extolling the virtues of religion, i'm gonna allow myself a moment to bask in a warm, well-earned glow of godly satisfaction before i get back to my regular business of drunken ranting and tales of random sexual encounters.  you can understand that, right?

the guttermorality case for religion

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A great swindle of our time is the assumption that science has made religion obsolete.  All science has damaged is the story of Adam and Eve and the story of Jonah and the whale.  Everything else holds up pretty well, particularly lessons about fairness and gentleness.  People who find these lessons irrelevant in the twentieth century are simply using science as an excuse for greed and harshness.  Science has nothing to do with it. 

kurt vonnegut

like many of my generation, i didn't spend a lot of time in church growing up, but like most of my generation, i was raised and surrounded by adults who had.  i didn't appreciate the significance of this fact until fairly recently.

there weren't a lot of rules and laws governing personal behavior back when i grew up, because there didn't need to be.  today, we're filling the moral vacuum that is the downside of the sexual revolution with all kinds of stupid freedom-restricting curfews, zero-tolerance policies, hate-crimes statutes and anti-bullying laws, as if pursuing such a government-mandated strategy is a reasonable substitute for good parenting.

and, as someone who was raised in such a way as to not require such nanny-state oversight in order to make his way through life without hurting other people, and on behalf of all other such people, may i say i resent the living fuck out of it.

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am i saying a secular upbringing can't produce ethical, empathetic, enlightened children?  of course not--it's done all the time, but it's generally a result of those rare parents who have a game plan and work it hard--some basic philosophical underpinning that'll act as counterbalance to everything the kid picks up out in the world.  otherwise, where's he gonna get his moral and ethical grounding?  i'll tell you where:  from TV, the internet, his school and his dumbass friends, that's where.

for myself, if the universe were to be so imprudent as to place an impressionable child in my care, you would soon see my agnostic ass seeking out, joining and regularly attending a goddam church.

the whole fake-prom thing

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as regular readers know, i don't spend much time on gay-rights issues here--there are lots of bloggers out there who do that kinda shit better [and, frankly, care more] than i do--but constance mcmillen's story caught my attention early, and i've been following it closely.

because i can't help but admire her--not only for mustering the courage to buck the status quo in her backwoods little corner of mississippi, but for the quiet maturity, grace and restraint she's shown throughout what has become a very public spectacle.

brief background for those of you who haven't been paying attention:  constance wanted to bring her girlfriend as her date to her prom, and, rather than acceding to her request, her school district ended up cancelling the prom altogether, infuriating everybody and making constance the bad-guy pariah of her high school.  the ACLU got involved, tried to force the district to hold an all-inclusive prom anyway, was denied.  the parents of the heartbroken prom-deprived kids banded together and vowed to throw a private prom, to which constance and her date were putatively invited.

and this is where it gets interesting.

see, on prom night, constance and her date showed up at the country club as directed--and found, to their surprise, that there were actually two proms that night.  from constance's account in the advocate story:

"The one that I went to had seven people there, and everyone went to the other one I wasn’t invited to."

as for constance's prom? again, from the advocate story:

Two students with learning difficulties were among the seven people at the country club event, McMillen recalls.

"They had the time of their lives," McMillen says. "That's the one good thing that came out of this, [these kids] didn't have to worry about people making fun of them [at their prom]."

and that last quote is why you gotta love constance--but here's my favorite quote from the article, and the reason for this post:

Her school principal and teachers served as chaperones, but clearly there wasn't much to keep an eye on.

you get the implication here?  everybody was in on this cruel little hoax--every parent, every kid, every school administrator, the principal, every teacher, every country club employee, every employee of the venue where the "real" prom was held--everybody.  a perfect conspiracy of hundreds, and not one of 'em broke.

my question:  who was on the committee of supposed grown-ups that picked the five other clueless retards and rejects who were deemed sufficiently worthless to join the lesbian and her girlfriend at their private prom?

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back when i was in high school, my friends and i did a lot of crazy shit, but i think the thing that allowed us all to have faith in the future was the unspoken but universally-held belief that at some point we'd abandon all the petty, mean-spirited bullshit of youth and morph into responsible, do-the-right-thing adults like our parents and teachers.

shame the kids of itawamba county, mississippi no longer have that illusion to cling to.

a little reader advice

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one of my few cherished female readers emailed me the other day with the following question:

in light of recent events, i need to ask you this:

if I were a  gay man, would I (personal I, not general) have this much of a problem finding decent guys?

knowing as i do that the woman in question is smart, attractive, articulate, reasonably young and not without charm--i.e., by most definitions, a catch--i hereby answer her as follows:

of course you would.  see, here's the thing (and i'm not telling you anything you don't, on some basic estrogenic level, already know):  men, by their nature, are pigs--guys will only be as good as women demand they be, and they'll only be as bad as women allow them to be.

historically, women have always held all the cards--i.e, the power of collectively withholding the pussy.

problem is, in the last 40 years or so, women have gotten this idiotic notion into their heads that equality with men can only mean equivalence to men--i.e., they can't be truly "liberated" unless they match their male counterparts in sluttiness. which they've done, with admirable alacrity.

and thus, they've given away their golden ticket--for free.

great deal for the man, but maybe not so great for the liberated woman who, ultimately, wants what most women (straight and gay) want--a hearth and home of her own.

because why should a man settle for just your pussy when he can easily have so many other pussies simply for the asking?

it's a question to which the enslaved women of yesteryear knew the answer, but the enlightened women of today seem to have forgotten.

that make any sense, faithful female reader?  and if not, what were you expecting from a reactionary like me?