Big Fat Hairy Living

Hi, my name is Adam Peter Stein, and the proprietor of Big Fat Hairy Living has kindly asked me to submit the occasional entry. As encouraging and generous as he has been, I’ve been a bit slow off the dime here as my life is not full of notable events just now. After a (VERY pleasant) phone call he agreed to send me some questions to work as an introduction.

Not a bad solution, but as the pencil is in my hand, I’m gonna add a few extra extra rules to the game:

1. If the answer requires a conventional narrative composed of one-or-more parts, I’ll answer as usual.
2. If the answer is overdetermined, I’ll gainsay myself and both implied characters will have a brief discussion.
3. If I have no direct answer to the question I will substitute another question and answer that.

A happy childhood memory

OK. You are aware that most childhoods more or less suck, right? Whoever was the Russian author was who wrote “Every happy family is the same, but unhappy families are all different” was probably talking about things more transcendental than happiness and unhappiness. Here below, it’s hard to put your hand on a happy family (I’m going to ask you to try to get 30 years of family-directed television programs out of your minds); I understand there are families that tolerate a certain level of alcohol use, cannabis use by all members, transvestism and or transsexualism (not inherently bad or dangerous; less than alcohol, say), episodic gambling, church attendance kept up or not … and economically for us, there are miserable families with exactly the same one-or-more issues in operation. But that’s not the question posed — yer asking me to describe a happy (idiomatic usage) event (vide Minkowsky, 1930) from my specific life.

People who know me know I’m pretty much a miserable bastard and the further you go in my past the worst it gets (so, perhaps, thats evidence of progress). If it comes down to this, it would be a time when the number of my culpable acts was at an absolute minimum (Disney World? Tried to impress strangers too much — it goes like that). I suspect it was in Chris Gorzelnick’s basement playing A AD&D (1977-79) after years of slogging and battling through the Marlboro school system (with a brief jaunt on the short bus to Freehold Special Ed). Tiny Henry Kissinger Chris (who used to torture me when women were around); gallant, sincere Bill; taciturn, politically-to-the-right-of-Bill-Cheney Dirk; fun ethnic cliche Gerbil Goldman; malignantly brilliant Wendy Kielan (from one of the Bell Telephone aristocratic families and therefore destined to MIT); benignly spiritual and capable-of-many-kinds-of-loving Kathy Hays; professional goofball and future musician Danny Golberg; and sweet, funny, vulnerable Nancy. (Wendy would gang up with Gerbil Goldberg in an attempt to entangle Danny and Bill and Chris and Kathy and Wendy and Nancy, in a romantic Plain Bob Major as convoluted as any Moliere comedy. Except it was hardly ever funny and everyone on the stage is, at minimum, pissed off with everyone involved and, at worst, required therapy later. Ask any of us about Operation Yenta and expect tears.)

But this is a happy memory, so let me offer it up: it’s approaching twelve at night and we’re wrapping up a game (which I didn’t completely understand having been thrown pretty much right into the middle — a mark of Chris’s Kool Kidz affect to reach the inner circle by senior year). Mrs. Gorzelnick had brought down her bubble blintze cake (and God if he exists as my witness I will reconstruct the recipe for), Chris twisted a hunk off and so did I and it was sweet and creamy and good, Steeleye Span and Kate Bush and the Stones and Jethro Tull and Brian Eno and Discipline and Yes were playing on the stylus-player, everyone’s in-school act was relaxed, and I realized (and this is a cliche, I apologize) it was possible for others to posses a fondness for me that I didn’t have to work all out for — that I had non-fungible, intrinsic value as a human being, awkward, bellowing, pompous Ted Knight that I was; through all of that, people could see the human spark in me, no science-know-it-all, no what-I-saw-on-Buck-Rogers-last-night … some unknown thing that said “yes” to the world.

I drove home with Dirk. We were playing “2000 Miles”, and I will always love the Pretenders for that song; Dirk was talking about relatives in Minnesota. I felt the cold dark medium of the universe flow through me, like breath through a clarinet, like wind through trees, as helpless and as sad and as heartsick and as desperately lonely as as a man in a boat on the sea in a Japanese bowl. And love was there too. Everyone I knew at the time was heterosexual, none of the women saw me as any KIND of catch, but there was love, wound around the bones of my chest, the checkers-stack of my spine, waving like banners in the wind of occult substance that blows bodiless between stars, love.

Cantus-Mundi:~ adamstein$

What happens when you take the concept behind Postsecret, allow people to use Microsoft Paint instead of actual paper, host it on a tacky social networking site, and make the secrets downright moronic? You get the Livejournal community fandomsecrets.

There’s something really creepy about the phrase “Young Liberals of Canada.” It’s like wearing a T-shirt that says “I skipped youthful idealism and went straight to Yuppie greed.”

I wonder what it would be like to have a kid and then find out that she’s a Young Liberal. It must be like finding out that grandma is into gangsta rap. I mean, I suppose that it’s possible that ninety year old grandma Ethel could actually enjoying listening to songs about shooting cops and slapping bitches. I also suppose that one’s 18 year old daughter Susie really could enjoy kowtowing to the interests of the establishment. That doesn’t mean they’re both not really fucking disturbing.

I can just imagine a school yard of young Conservatives, young Liberals, and young New Democrats. The young Conservatives would probably be busy stealing candies from the poor kids. In response, the young New Democrats would probably be forming a committee to discuss some kind of social candy distribution program. The young Liberals would probably run to mom and dad to borrow their video camera so that they can produce abysmally bad rip offs off Apple commercials explaining how evil the young Conservatives are for stealing more candy than the Liberals did when they were in charge of the school yard.

After an excruciatingly long day in various planes not built for fat people, Mark and I arrived safely. The sex toy for my new fetish is safely unpacked and stored away, as are my delicious treasures from Trader Joe’s.

Today Mark and I packed most of our stuff. We had Texas barbecue and shopped at Trader Joe’s. Mark is lying on the bed with his treasures from Trader Joe’s arranged in front of him, admiring them and watching Alien vs. Predator.

I enjoyed my new fetish this afternoon. I think I’m sexed out now.

The hotel is now swarming with daddies, and I had sex with two of them. One of them choked me on his dick while the other fucked me with his big cock.

Now I will join Mark poolside and feast on locally grown cherries.

The only thing we did today other than lounge around the pool and eat Mexican food was visit Q Trading so that I could buy a sex toy for my new fetish.

•

When I first arrived in Palm Springs, I was so enthralled by the warm weather and the palm trees that I thought I’d never want to go home. The more time I spent here, the more I’ve come to realize that, as wonderful a place as it is to visit, the climate alone isn’t enough to make it a place I’d want to live.

I think that the form and plan of a city can have subtle but profound effects on one’s thinking. I wonder if my hunch that that suburban built form is inherently conservative is correct. Is the inherently anti-social character of suburbia a direct contributor to the rise of false and dangerous ideologies like conservatism, or the even more idiotic libertarianism?

The car-oriented layout of Palm Springs makes getting around almost impossible for anyone who doesn’t have a car. People are so used to driving everywhere that anyone walking on the street seems to be assumed to be either poor or mentally ill. When Mark and I rode the transit system, we were the only people on the mostly empty bus who didn’t appear to be either homeless or simply extremely poor. What must it be like being rich, old, and white in Palm Springs, being able to live one’s life in a complete bubble with almost no meaningful interaction with anyone of a lower social class except for perhaps the Mexican gardener?

The public realm here is almost completely non-existent, leading the city to attempt to recreate it with events like the street fair Mark and I went to last night. It was fun, but it still felt a bit artificial. The city deliberately destroyed the possibility of street life with its planning choices, then attempts to recreate a fake version of it .

I think that one of the great things about the place I live is that I encounter all kinds of people every day; it bothers that my downtown is slowly being turned into a haven for rich yuppies rather than staying a place where people of differing social classes live next to each other. But despite that, when I think about the things that I’d miss if I lived here, the first things that come to mind other than friends and family are all things I enjoy because of the way my neighbourhood is built. I’d miss being able to take the subway and save money by not having a car. I’d miss being able to walk to anything I could possibly want. I’d miss living in a place that, maybe because of all those things, still has a tinge of progressivism in it. The idea of social democracy might be on life support in Canada, but at least it isn’t completely dead. Living in a place like that is more important to me than I think I realized before.

Yesterday we made the mistake of trying to take the Palm Springs public transit system to try to go shopping. The bus comes only every 25 minutes and stops every few blocks at time points. Can someone explain scheduling to the nice people of Palm Springs, please?

Our day was pretty quiet. We spent it hanging around the pool with friends, one of whom (a local fuck slut who was in the Sunday foursome) is the most incredible ass muncher I’ve ever encountered. Man, can he ever tongue fuck an asshole. We haven’t had the chance to fuck yet, and my goal is to get his big, fat eight inch long cock up my ass before Mark and I leave.

In the evening, we went to a street festival that happens every Thursday on one of the main streets in downtown Palm Springs. It was strangely postmodern. “Let’s plan a town that’s completely hostile to pedestrians,” I can imagine some politician saying, “then compensate by creating completely fake street life once a week for a few hours.” It was still fun. I surreptitiously took pictures of some of the many hot, fat, juicy young cubby boys.

After watching a hilarious show at the Rainbow Cactus last night, Mark and got a chance to cruise down Indian Canyon drive in a hot bear’s convertible. It was fun groping and riding.

This morning, we went on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, which travels up the side of Mount San Jacinto to an altitude of more than 2500 metres. The air up there was noticeably thinner.

Despite the fact that Palm Springs is an urban planning nightmare living on borrowed time — it exists only because of cheap oil and an underground aquifer that’s being drained faster than it can be replenished — I could really imagine living here. Even though moving here would be pretty much impossible, I talked with Mark about it. His major concern was that we’d get bored with Palm Springs, as there’s not really that much to do. I pointed out that we don’t exactly do very much in Toronto either.

Tonight we’re going to be heading to a friend’s place for an American Idol taco party. I don’t care too much for American Idol, but the friend has a postively gigantic cock, and his boyfriend is gorgeous. They’re old friends of Mark’s from Toronto, so I doubt there will be any action, but they’ll be feeding us tacos and stuff. In a close contest, tacos always win over penis.