Welp. I’ve emptied the cat box and taken out the garbage for the last time as a 50-year-old.

So the bloom’s off THAT lily.

Facebook has reminded me that I’ve apparently begun commemorating the night before each birthday with a selfie next to the girls. So here we are again. Looking gay as a purse full of kittens.

What I want for my birthday, in no particular order:
• Less stuff
• Someone objective to help me have less stuff
• A hellfire-damning Mueller report
• A fresh start with a normal kitten
• One single little sentence in which autocorrect hasn’t Needlessly capitalized something
• Less stuff
• A bedroom that I’ve finally painted rich-people blue to cover its current state of urine-sample gold
• Someone to help me find the right shade of rich-people blue
• My old abs
• Lots of cake
• But without compromising my old abs
• A Broadway dance career
• Less stuff
• Abs

How to be a theater person:

1. Repeatedly check your score and sing along with the cast recording to memorize your music for a show as you fold and put away three weeks of unfolded laundry.
2. Have three weeks of unfolded laundry because you’ve been in another show.
3. Stumble on your souvenir tearaway thong and souvenir backup tearaway thong from said previous show as you’re folding all that (clean! I swear!) laundry.
4. Instead of figuring out where the hell to put your souvenir tearaway thong and souvenir backup tearaway thong (DAMNIT, AUTOCORRECT! Not once in the last four tries have I intended to type thing!), artfully arrange them with the score of your new show on a bed of unmatched socks to post them dramatically but tastefully on Facebook.
5. Panic that you’ve already forgotten all the music you’ve reviewed and learned as you’ve folded and put away. Because your mind is clearly too busy trying to figure out where to put your souvenir things.

Two years ago I was a pretty big mess:

I was spiraling up and down from the ramp-up and withdrawal effects of a changing cocktail of bipolar meds, my face was lacerated and I was enduring the pain of a concussion from a blackout and a full-body crash to a tile floor caused by a med that thankfully would become my lifeline and savior, and my mom was blaming autocorrect for turning “row” into “rowboat” in a post about my having a relative six good days in a rowboat. (Damn. It just happened to me too.)

But I’m now up to two good years in a rowboat, and I’m so thankful that I’ve been exposing myself daily to hundreds of people. Plus I still call dibs on “Six Good Days in a Rowboat” for my memoirs.

Three miles! 10:46 pace!

The 10:16 pace was actually just Rob and me; he slogged along with my slow ass so we could talk about SHOW TUNES! Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Rival-gang-member-and-occasional-interloper Traci (whom I’m calling a rival gang member here solely for the purpose of layering dramatic tension into this artfully nuanced narrative) sprinted ahead with pack-leader Scott and talked about the dreary sociopolitical metaphors of prescription constipation medication commercials. Or grapes. Or something. How would I know? I was in the back discussing Bernadette Peters’ surprisingly tepid movie career with Rob.

Anyway, here is this morning’s litany of complaints:
• Rob was 10 minutes late because he went the wrong way on the highway
• Because Bernadette Peters’ surprisingly tepid movie career is distressing to the point of highway distraction
• Rob’s 10 minute delay seems to have increased the potentially us-hitting automobile cross traffic on our running trail exponentially
• BECAUSE ROB WENT THE WRONG WAY ON THE HIGHWAY THIS MORNING
• WHO DOES THAT?
• OK, I’ve done it a couple times too
• But I’ll never admit it on here
• The fog this morning was insane
• Autocorrect just insisted that I wanted to write about insane figs
• That’s crazy
• Anyway, back to the fog ...
• It was so thick
• (How thick was it?)
• The fog this morning was so thick that it made us all sopping wet after our run
• What? Not everything has to be a joke, people
• Sheesh
• Let’s see ... Rob has driving-moron issues, Traci ran with us, Scott may or may not have talked about grapes, I’m awesome because this is my narrative and I control the content, Bernadette Peters, lots of cross traffic, insane figs, wet runners, sheesh ... that about covers everything
• Except we tried to stand or squat in levels for our post-run selfie and I chose to squat and then I had a hard time standing up afterward
• Probably because I have scurvy caused by an acute grape deficiency
• Or maybe it’s figs
• Which is insane

LITANY OF COMPLAINTS:

• Canada apparently burned down the White House while I was asleep
• The Fake News media totally fake-newsily didn’t even cover it
• “Feisty Cherry” Diet Coke
• Antonín Dvořák’s New World Symphony is on the radio right now and I’m trapped because I love hearing the muted ti-ti-ti-tum-tum violin motifs in the third movement and I don’t want to leave the room and miss them
• Not even for a quick run to the bathroom
• Which will happen the moment the entire ti-ti-ti-tum-tum exposition has finished
• Trust me on this
• Because damn, we have a loud toilet
• Autocorrect automatically put the accent in Antonín just now but I had to add all the diacritics to Dvořák myself
• Plus it nonchalantly changed automatically to automagically
• Seriously, autocorrect?
• I’M the only one allowed to make up stupid words on my blog
• Forrealsly
• If autocorrect is going to keep this up, we might as well thank Canada for burning down the White House, disband the last coherent fragments of our country and convert our phone keyboards to Cyrillic right now
• Settings > General > Language & Region > iPhone Language > Russian
• до свидания

#WeirdStuffICollectOnMyPhone

I say I want some resolutions

I will turn 50 in April (that’s not the actual resolution — it’s just the preamble to the resolution) and to celebrate I will run every race within 100 miles that’s been on my bucket list — plus any other races I discover that sound fun — all summer, culminating in a back-to-back three-day Disney 5K/10K/half marathon in November.

I won’t let up until I get a small group of runner friends to come to Disney World with me.

Plus any of their partners or spouses who want to cheer us on between days of helping us hobble through the parks.

You’ve been warned.

I will stop thinking PB&J and Diet Coke are an acceptable dinner.

I will stop lying to myself about giving up PB&J and Diet Coke for dinner.

I will stop launching scorched-earth Twitter fights with cousin-curious Trump supporters to the point that I make myself angry every time I open my Twitter notifications and discover that they still don’t know how to lose and shut up and go away like normal morons.

I will figure out how to stop my iPhone’s autocorrect from capitalizing Random (see? do you SEE what it’s Doing?) words in the middle of sentences.

I will figure out how to use the universal remote I bought for our TV.

I will use these accomplishments as the final credits I need to finally get my engineering degree.

I will start (or finish) reading all the books I bought (or received as gifts) in 2017 (or 2016) (or before that).

I will get the hint and cut my losses the first time someone shows me we don’t have much of a friendship and it’s never going to go anywhere.

I will bury my tinkle-colored bedroom walls in a deep, rich, handsome, masculine, adult color that I have yet to determine.

I will nag and complain without shame or reservation until we replace our pinky-beige, mousy-blah, suburban-horror Formica countertops with something that doesn’t make me want to hide under the sink and slowly die of mousy-blah ennui hastened by poisoning from any store-brand Formica cleanser we have stored there.

I will continue to cull and integrate and sell and give away the two-bedroom-apartment contents of my storage unit at least to the point that I can downsize to a smaller (cheaper!) storage unit.

I will not use my newfound storage-unit savings to binge on shoes.

Although one man’s “bingeing” is another man’s “stocking up.”

I will stop wasting time winding up the vacuum cleaner cord.

I will work harder (notice that I’m not giving myself any form of schedules or deadlines here) to post more frequent #ArtThrob essays about my favorite works of art.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will stop accepting Facebook friend requests from strangers just because they’re cute.

I will finally join a gym. And maybe post some gym selfies once in a while to prove I’m going there.

I will avoid the New Year’s Day Rose Parade. And all other parades. Just like always. Because parades are stupid.

A few years ago I made a resolution to say or at the very least email or text something nice to somebody — longtime friend or random Internet stranger — every day. The resolution has slowly evolved to also include just texting or emailing a random hello to someone I haven’t talked to in a while. I’m sure I’ve missed a few days here and there, but overall it’s become a happy little daily habit that’s kept me in touch or even reconnected with people from every corner of my almost 50-year (ACK! How did that happen?) life (except for a handful of guys I’ve had longtime crushes on because I’d die inside whether they did or didn’t respond — and, sadly, at almost 50 years old (did I mention I’m almost 50?) I’m still kinda scared of guys I have high-school crushes on). Crippling insecurities aside, I’m renewing my daily-compliment-hello contract for yet another year. And I encourage all of you to consider trying something similar. Because it’s WAY cheaper than flowers. Or therapy. Happy 2018! :-)

Spellcheck changes covfefe to confederate

Press 1 for English.
Press 2 for Spanish.

Press covfefe for Russian.

Oh, hi! It's Jake.

You probably don't recognize me behind this body mic. I'm also wearing a false mustache (which I just tried to spell as moustache but spellcheck zapped me with the Cattle Prod of Shame, though this is all beside the point) so you may perceive an imperceptible difference in the way I look.

Anyway, I have something to announce that I've been keeping a highly disciplined secret for a couple months now: I'm in a show! And we just tonight completed our penultimate rehearsal, which means we have our final (or "ultimate" as they say in places where they use the word "ultimate") rehearsal tomorrow night ... and then we open our mere four-show run on Thursday. And here's a fun-for-the-whole-family idea: You should come see it! I'd tell you it's about an English woman pretending to be a Polish man pretending to be a French woman but you and I both know that's ridiculous. So here's the insider scoop: It's really about a gay French waiter who works on the side as a gay French choreographer and eventually works his way up the corporate ladder to don a false mustache and become a secretly gay Chicago mobster. The show is called Jake/Jake/Jake and you can find showtime and ticketing info here: Jake/Jake/Jake!

Flashback Friday: Flaming Friars Edition

I played a firefighter and a cheesy dancing monk, as one does, in an original musical about blossoming gay romance in a monastery, which just took me four attempts to spell with zero help from autocorrect, in my last show with always-delightfully-inventive Chicago Gay Men's Chorus eight years ago. I can't find an archive of shows on the CGMC site to confirm the name, but I believe it was called Bad Habits. Or maybe Betcha Can't Spell Monastery on the First Try. If I remember correctly, my firefighter character showed up at the end of the show for a false alarm, but otherwise a good name might have been Putting Out the Friars. Or, given the budding-gay-romance theme, it could have been shortened to just Outing the Friars. The show included a brilliant repurposing of the impossible-to-memorize-because-it-used-every-rhyming-word-in-Latin "Amor volat undique" from Carl Orff's epic cantata Carmina Burana, so we could have called our show Carmina Burnana. Or Carmina Banana since we'd already broken the calling-ourselves-fruits barrier with an earlier production titled Low-Hanging Fruit. In any case, the moral of this story is I wish CGMC had a more thorough archive of show titles on its site -- or at least the mobile version of its site -- so I wouldn't have to embarrass myself like this struggling to remember the name of a show I did eight -- which autocorrect just changed to "right" so WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM, AUTOCORRECT? YOU WANNA TAKE THIS OUTSIDE? BECAUSE I GUARANTEE YOU DON'T WANNA TAKE THIS OUTSIDE -- years ago about monks and firefighters in a place I still need to learn how to spell. Ooo! What about Love Amonk Friends? Or Monktown Abbey? Or Going Robe? Or Monk Rock? Or Monk'd? Or Friar Knowledge? Or if my part had been bigger and I'd maybe have had the romance with one of the gay monks -- both of whom I remember as being totally cute -- we could have called it Friarfighter. But that sounds more like the exact opposite of romance -- kinda like MME [for Monk Madness Entertainment] Smackdown! -- so maybe not. Wait! Monkey Business! That would have been totally awesome! So would Hey, Hey, we're the Monkees, but I think that had already been taken by some other monastery (there's that word again, still with no help from autocorrect, but this time it took me only two tries so my retention skills are improving) act. No! Wait! I've got it! Monky Town! MONK. Y. TOWN. Ha! They really don't pay me enough for my brilliance on Facebook. I need to open a GoMonkMe page on here to make my remuneration commonksurate with my talents. Because, as you just KNEW this was coming so you have no one to blame but yourselves for reading this last sentence, Monky Makes the World Go 'Round.