As an Art History major, you can imagine my awe at the fact that my academic advisor would be the head author of the 7th edition of Janson’s History of Art and the head contributor of Renaissance chapters in all editions since. This massive text first entered my life when I was a sophomore in high school and manages to insert itself in to the life of nearly every student who takes so much as an introduction to visual arts course. When I found out Professor Roberts would be the lead author of this iconic text, my pre-existing fandom of her increased tenfold.

I’ve only been arrested once. I say that as if most people have been arrested multiple times. I was pretty drunk at the time and don’t remember much about it. I know that I never had to go in to a jail cell or a drunk tank and that taking me to the police station was more of a formality than anything else. Me puking in the back of the cop car probably wasn’t exactly protocol, but I think it was a nice touch.

During the five years I lived in Chicago, I dated my fair share of aspiring artists. There was the fashion designer, the performance artist, the painter, the actor, the sculptor… I even dated an artist’s assistant. And as time passed, and a new one would enter my life, their medium was exactly how I would refer to them to my friends. This made it easier on them, especially since I never seemed to repeat an art form.

“So the performance artist and I went to this comedy show last night.”

“Oh, remember how the artist’s assistant drove a Vespa during the summers?”

“The painter really has a thing for doing Lindsay Lohan portraits…”

And even though I truly appreciate the time I spent with each most of them, this is still how I refer to them in my head when I think about them.

Like most of my sexual encounters.

See also: double entendre, hey yo!

Sometimes, when I’m not sure what to write about, I’ll grab one of my old handwritten journals off of my bookshelf. I’ll flip through it for a few minutes, all in an attempt to find a story worth revisiting in the superior, all-knowing, “I told you so” narrative. Unfortunately, all that usually happens is the opening of a flood gate of embarrassing memories that I’ve worked so hard to not think about on a daily basis. I’m embarrassed to have ever been that young, that confused, that self-victimized, that emotive to the whine-y degree…I’m embarrassed about the word choices, the exaggerated handwriting, and please, don’t remind me about the free-form poetry.

In my journey to be expressive and information-spreading, I reach that “ignorance is bliss” moment. I resolve to write about what feels good, no matter how anorexic the end result, starved of my complete worldview. I tell, nay order, myself, “Be funny.”

For an unnerving moment, I wonder if this is how all of my comedic writing has come to fruition. In that moment, I reach for that last journal. Though, actually, it’s my first. Dated 1992, it’s an illustrative diary from grade school. As a class we would learn basic sentence structure by writing almost anything we wanted. The fun part came in drawing what the statement was expressing. I’m pretty sure it was never graded because mine is full of things like, “During spring vocation I did many things. First I went to the Ymca Second I went to grate amiacka I had a good time.” In addition to the spelling problems and complete reinvention of simple sentence structure, all of the G’s were written backwards. Oddly enough, despite my mother’s appeal to the school board that I be held back a year, I graduated that Spring.

Quite the aspiring scholar, I kept the journal up during summer break. Though, instead of sentences, I asked my grandma to teach me new words to spell that I could then also draw. I learned useful phrases like, “sundae,” “Coors Light,” and “Marlboro Reds.” It was only after those that she spelled out a new word. It was only four letters but I couldn’t figure it out and asked her how I was supposed to draw it if I didn’t know what it was. She told me to think about it some more and, after some more confusion on my part, told me to go look in the toilet.

The quest to be informed and all-encompassing can be depressive and cringe-inducing, but comedy isn’t necessarily always the fog that covers these parts of us. Comedy is organic is life.

I remember being 18, living in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and also attempting to survive the sinking ship of a long distance relationship with my boyfriend that I’d left behind in California in order to go to college. I had just left my psychiatrist’s office in Highland Park, whom I, after utilizing a high school AP-level understanding of mental illness, had just gotten to write me a prescription for mood-tranquilizers generally given to people with bipolar disorder. Oh, and I’d also gotten diagnosed as being bipolar.

In retrospect, I’ve never been bipolar, but I think being eighteen, in love, and finding myself in both a foreign geographic region and an isolating social climate lead me to believe I was. And as mental illnesses go, if you believe enough in your self diagnosis, it’s easy enough to make a PhD holding professional believe what you want them to. I guess back then I really couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that someone might be happy one minute and sad the next – even in a situation where I was happy getting to know some new friends of mine and then, seconds later, sad because I’d just received a text message from my boyfriend saying he wouldn’t be calling me that night because he was hanging out with “Andrew.”

Anyways, it was afterwards, at a Walgreens, while I wandered down the aisle, numb, waiting for the pharmacist to fill my prescription. My phone vibrated with a message from this guy I barely knew back in California letting me know he had something to tell me. Dealing with everything I was dealing with at that moment – you know, my newly professionally cemented bipolar disorder label – I brushed him off. I think his name was Steven. I didn’t talk to Steven again until a couple of months later when I’d found out what he had to tell me via other means. I got in touch with him to confirm what he had been trying to warn me about and to apologize for not listening to what he was trying to report.

In retrospect though, maybe I’m more thankful for the extra weeks of ignorance. And for those weeks in which my filled prescription finally went to work and left me completely guarded and unfeeling towards what I was about to endure.

And if this blog were a TV adaptation, and this really were season two… this is the part where we’d need to hire the actor who played V back for a cameo appearance in the crucial break up flashback episode.

V and I broke up. I don’t consciously remember it being one thing in particular that caused it. Just that sudden, inexplicable change in feelings that happens after a time period and makes me nervous to get involved with any one person again anytime soon. If two people can both choose to invest seven months in one another and then one day, one of them just isn’t feeling it anymore… is that really the gamble we want to repeatedly take? Or when we finally let the right one in, is this not at all a problem? Or is this the point where two people decide to work at love? And if so, can I just hire habitat for humanity the next time I’m in a relationship? Because I’m fucking lazy.

I had stopped returning V’s calls and texts the weekend before the break up happened. I slipped in to introversion to contemplate my changing feelings towards him and didn’t bother to tell him I was doing so. I didn’t want him to know things were anything but fine… but when your significant other is dodging you for days, it becomes pretty obvious that things are awry. I had several conversations with friends about what was going on inside my head. I knew that I could stick around and work at it, but I also knew that I wasn’t positive that I wanted things to work out. I wanted what I always want, a constant stream of butterflies and mutual admiration. I was at a major stand-still – bored, unflinching, and day dreaming.

V came over towards the end of the weekend to call me out on my bullshit absence. He brought up our disintegrated sex life, my lack of talking about him to my family, my bouts of self-involvement, etc. And then he gave me what I viewed as an ultimatum. Stop wasting his time and leave him or commit to working on what we’d built. In my panicked brain, this easily translated to “now or forever.” He left, giving me a week to think it over. I immediately turned on The Way We Were starring Barbara Streisand before slipping in to my usual Sunday evening coma.

By the next morning I knew I didn’t need a week to think it over. And my body knew that it couldn’t survive letting the week pass either. I was so stressed out and overemotional. It was the beginning of my third week of a new job  and I was already that guy who was almost crying on the sale’s floor, allowing his personal drama to effect him in the work place. After the shift was over and I’d sufficiently embarrassed myself  in front of new co-workers, I used technology to find out where V was. This was also the day that I stopped using FourSquare.

It was nice out (birds chirping, and shit) and he was in a park that was on my walk home. My heart was beating out of my chest. And eventually I did it. I broke up with V. Through a strained voice and with sunglasses to hide sadness. There was silence for a while and then it was interrupted by him saying, “I want to say something. But everything I have to say is just me trying to get you to change your mind.” To which I said, “I want to say something, but I know if I do, I’ll just start crying.” Halfway through, I’d started sobbing.

He left. And then I was alone. And I realized that for the first time, I was alone in San Francisco. And at first that scared me. But then I saw the possibility.

next time on drown the children: the petty and sloppy break up episode

The decision to end the night wasn’t brought on by California’s 2 AM liquor licenses and thus any sort of last call. The Stud stays open until 3 or 4 to let the queer hipsters and drag queens that flood it on a Friday night dance their way in to as many bad decisions as possible. My resolve to leave was brought about by one of these bad decisions – though, for once, it was somebody else’s and not my own. I was stumbling around the bar, waving and smiling at people I know when I decided to head to the dance floor. I walked past the curtain barrier that separates the front bar area from the back stage/dance area and saw JJ kissing Andy fucking Dick.

OK, so it sounds so middle school and you, the reader, only know who one of those people is and it wasn’t even the real Andy Dick – just someone who looks similar and is probably as big of a mess as the real one. And, so yeah, OK, I was also kind of ignoring Juan-John (JJ), the typical, awkward treatment I put a guy through when I’m trying to transition from the “We’ve spent a lot of time naked together” state of being to the “Let’s be fully-clothed friends” type of existence. And really, in retrospect I don’t care that he was making out with Andy Dick. Whatever Pride-weekend-centric habit of falling asleep next to each other that JJ and I had indulged in had quickly become nothing more than a fond memory and a potential for friendship after the realization that nothing serious was going to come from it.

Still, in my state of inebriation, walking in on this ridiculous moment combined with my general lack of having any sort of logical reason to stick around the bar for much longer queued my “early” exit.

Rolling over alone in my queen sized bed the next morning, slight hangover to prevent me from falling back asleep, groping for my phone in my constantly pitch-black room, and texting my friend Marc who had missed the previous night’s festivities for a detox weekend at his family’s house away from the city: “Last night. JJ tried to make me jealous by talking about fucking some Australian guy earlier this week. Asked if he could come home with me. Then caught him making out with Andy fucking Dick. All in that order. Usual drama.”

These are the sort of laughable, petty instances that I masochistically missed about being single. Yes wary readers, as my last post (a little treat to make the ‘summer’ hiatus more bearable) months ago alluded to, I am single again. As a result, my life has gone from ‘domestic homebody’ to something loads more reminiscent of my life that involved nearly 100% of my favorite retrospective entries contained in this blog. That said, I’m excited to be writing again and I think I have an exciting new batch of misadventures planned out to share in the coming weeks.

DROWN THE CHILDREN:
SEASON TWO

DROWN THE CHILDREN:
SEASON TWO
COMING SOON

—-

So I’m working retail again. Apparel. What a terrible thing. Women are slobs and I’m finding out the hard way that metal hangers give me a rash.

Anyways, I had yesterday off and it was pretty nice here. Sunny without being too hot. A light breeze if you will. So I went to Mission Delores Park – this awesome park in San Francisco that hipsters, gays, and stoners flock to when it’s not raining. It overlooks downtown and the view makes you feel as if you’re more removed from the city than you are. It’s kind of a great place to just appreciate the city – something I’ve needed since the break up on Monday. I realized that part of what made Chicago so great was that I felt like I was in a relationship with it and now that I’m single for the first time since living here, I can hopefully pursue that kind of thing with SF. I was also determined to get very, very, very drunk – and that’s something I’m usually pretty good at succeeding at.

So a water bottle full of vodka-cran (my drink of choice this past month) and multiple happy hours later I basically black out. Or, at least, I thought I did.

I come to, I’m in my bed, and my shoulders hurt. Sun burn central. And the events of the previous evening (I didn’t make it to night) start to come back to me in reverse order. I remember falling asleep while SOBBING over the clip from ‘the other sister’ I posted on my wall – the Garry Marshall film about a mentally handicapped woman in love.

My stomach rumbles and my first feeling is of pride – I may have drank all those empty calories but I didn’t eat a thing! This break up was /not/ going to make me fat. Unfortunately, at this point I also realized that I was covered in shredded lettuce and salt and then remembered my trip to McDonald’s and the Big Mac I ate in bed.

I roll over and decide to accept the fact that my second happy hour and third bloody mary (after like four vodka-crans) would be my last recallable memory. But then I realize that there might be more… My brain is fuzzy but certain things start to come in to focus. I remember being in a courtyard… and there being a room… full of folding chairs and people… I remember looking for a bar… not finding one… and thinking that it might be like a time share seminar where you have to sit through a meeting before you get to drink for free… so I sit down and remember being shocked at how early it was… and then people started talking… and one guy was really in to his story about sucking dick for meth… but I really wanted to interrupt him to talk about myself… and finally just being bored and leaving early.

And I didn’t realize it then, but I realize it now. I had gone to my first AA meeting – something I hadn’t planned on doing until my 40s! I don’t remember how I got there but the only reasonable thing I can come up with is that I got invited off the street, which is both embarrassing /and/ insulting. When I pulled my pants in to bed to see if I had any cash left, my pockets were full of raffle tickets. I can only assume that I assumed that they were drink tickets for the “party” I was at. Some party. And now I’m getting texts from some girl named Krisha whom I can only assume is my sponsor. Well, from one relationship to the next, I suppose.