Reader mail

I started writing this blog for the usual reasons: manufacturing a social life to mask the pain of my abject loneliness … parlaying exhaustive descriptions of what I cooked for dinner into lucrative book deals … impressing a hunky Canadian blogger with my witty bons mots to the extent that he’d decide to move to Chicago and fall madly in love with me.

And this was all way back before blogs (at least the blogs by hunky Canadians that I was reading but who obviously weren’t reading me back) had comment features. Or before it even occurred to me to crave want comments to validate my sad, lonely existence. Blogger itself was slow to jump on the comment-technology bandwagon—its templates didn’t even have a way to put an email address in a sidebar, and it is to this day a major source of pride that I figured out the HTML and added the mailto thingy you see to your right all by myself. Eventually I stumbled on HaloScan and added its comment HTML to my source code as well, and we entered a new era of HTML-confident interactive lovin’ here at NoFo.

At the time, very few people were reading (or obviously even knew about) my blog. Especially the hunky Canadians. So all the HaloScan in the world wasn’t bringing me any comment lovin’. But I started a campaign of leaving brilliantly clever (ahem) comments on popular blogs, which Internet surfers across the globe relished and then clicked on my blog link to read more … and slowly the readership and the lovin’ started coming in.

The majority of comments (all 10 of them) that I received in those early, heady days were the usual niceties one would hope for: compliments, attaboys, funny observations and demands for dates from readers named Christopher Meloni.

Then a couple years ago I ran a series of posts about my adventures in liposuction—which I thought people would appreciate for their in-the-trenches honesty and gruesome scar photography. Instead they generated a deluge of blistering hate mail excoriating me for my arrogance and vanity and body fascism. And the anti-lovin’ kept coming, even after I conceded that liposuction is the stupidest thing you can do with your body and your money.

I let the hate mail stay up, though, if only to show people that not everyone with a strong opinion about my elective surgeries has the decency to be logical about it. Or articulate. Or to demonstrate a rudimentary command of spelling and grammar. Or to have the maturity to include a name or a valid email address.

Like my love handles, the hate mail never fully went away. I’ve talked to other bloggers about this, and the consensus seems to be that you know you’ve finally arrived when the haters and the freakos find you. And keep coming back.

Since this blog exists primarily for my own amusement—and being called a faggot or an asshole or for some odd reason a Jewboy isn’t terribly amusing for me—I started just deleting the comments I didn’t like. Then I discovered that HaloScan has a comment-moderation feature that lets me delete ugly comments and ban ugly commenters before the meandering drool they write even sees the light of day.

But! Last week I got a puddle of that meandering drool that was obviously intended as a personal attack in the guise of an unconvincing concern for my eternal salvation. Instead of a signature, it had a link to a hostile MySpace page misconjugatingly titled JESUS LOVE U, which has since disappeared. Which is a crime because it totally had sparkles.

And it was so ridiculous and so clumsy and so self-parodying and so deliciously unproofread that I’m posting it here instead of burying it in a comments window. I especially love the shorthand that reduces long, complicated words like you to simpler, more digestible words like u, which not only saves valuable time, but it adds a preciousness that makes me feel like I’m getting a lecture on homosexuality and religious “morality” from an adowaboo wittoo bunny wabbit:

in the bible say 1 corinthians : do you not know that the wicked will not inerit the kingdom of god? do not be deceived: neither the sexualy immoral nor idolater nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual ,nor thieves nor thwe greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will in herit the kingdom of god..the only way u can go to heaven is by jesus christ n ask god to fro give u 4 ur sin and stop sining n look 4 god ok..god bless u n jesus love u rember he die 4 u n ur sin

You say you want a resolution

I guess one of the benefits (?) of writing a blog is the accountability it gives you when you posted your new year’s resolutions a year earlier for everyone to see and keep track. How did I do? Let’s all find out together:

Repair the giant gap where the outside wall of my condo is ripping away from the inside wall. Done. And I even went one better: I repaired the over-expanded expansion joint at that same intersection. It had become an actual hole that made it unavoidable for me to smell my neighbor’s cooking and smoking; see her lights at night; and hear her phone ringing, her conversations with her hard-of-hearing sister, and her revolting screaming orgasms. And I took pictures (of the repair work—not the orgasms):

I filled the crack (crack!) with two kinds of expanding foam, which does not sand well, but it seemed to stop the orgasms. (I also got rid of that poor sun-faded, rippled bas relief world map, which I thought was the coolest thing in the … well … world when I got it for Christmas more than 10 years ago.)

Notice how nice and orgasm-free the wall looks when everything is sanded and painted. Notice how it doesn’t catch on the cheap plastic blinds. Notice the spiffy new valances my mom and dad helped me make last month to hide the cheap plastic tops of the cheap plastic blinds.

Change the HVAC filters. Since I don’t actually have central heat or central air in my condo, this was kind of a stupid resolution to make. My building has heating and air conditioning units (I said units!) built into the outside walls, though. I do know the difference, but blogger must have rewritten my post to make me look gay. In any case, I did take apart the units (I said units!) and wash the filters this summer. So we can consider this resolution achieved as well.

Learn to use a punching bag. There were times this year when I felt like I was a punching bag. Does that count?

Heal from lipo and never do it again. “Healing” is relative, I guess. I have no more pain. I have the remnants of two tiny scars on my hips. But the goo never totally went away, so I don’t count the operation as a complete success—which may or may not be considered “healing.” The never-do-it-again part of the resolution is gonna be pretty easy to keep, though.

Get rid of at least 100 things that are cluttering up my house. I’d estimate I got rid of three or four hundred things this year. And, again, I took pictures:

above: The top caption is supposed to give you a space-saving double read: Invisible jet phone! and Invisible jet clock! I was going for a really clever Wonder Woman reference, but since I had to explain it to you, the joke is lost. So never mind.

above: Shiny coats! Which I bought on purpose within the last five years!

above: Vinyl jeans! Which I bought on purpose within the last three years! (But I never wore two pair of the jeans, so I should get some credit for self-restraint.)

above: I haven’t had to play dress-up with any regularity since the early ’90s. But I obviously didn’t have to tell you that.

above: I really have nothing to say here.

above: De-crapping your life can be so cleansing.

above: Nothing says I kiss my sister. On the mouth. With tongue. faster than a string tank top. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind never to wear it.

above: Yes, that is The Sock you see in the upper right. And those are shorty-short short shorts you see in the upper left. And yes, they would have made a lovely ensemble with the string tank top. And no, I am not still in love with Richard Marx.

Run a 5K in under 8-minute miles. I don’t think I officially ran a 5K this year, but I did do an 8K in 8.5-minute miles. And I did some three-mile (which is about a 5K) sprints this year that I never timed. Chalk this resolution up as a kind-of.

Run the Chicago Marathon in under four hours. I shaved 16 minutes off last year’s time, but I was still 20 minutes short of my completely arbitrary four-hour goal. And I’m gonna keep trying.

Learn enough Web design that I can make a Web site of my own. I taught myself a ton of Photoshop. Does that count?

Get my long-dormant book published and/or my old newspaper column revived and syndicated. Oh, my goodness. Look at the time …

Continue in my personal quest to demonstrate to the world that gay people aren't abstract “threats” to the common good. We haven’t completely succeeded in destroying marriage, defiling the innocents, and filling the world with disgust and despair, but Secret Operative Dubya and Secret Operative Pope are still working on it.

January adventures

1) I cooked dinner for The Cuddler last night. And I didn’t burn it. (The funny thing is he actually watched me cook—with great intensity—as though I knew what I was doing and he might learn something. The joke’s on him, though; I can make exactly three things—all of which usually turn out dry and tasteless—and he’ll get nothing but disappointment if he’s looking to me for a culinary education.) After dinner, he indulged me in my newest obsession: an hour on the couch wrapped—BONUS!—in each other’s arms watching CSI. So you can tell right there he’s good people.

2) I’ve seen some amazing stuff on stage in the last few days. Last week Eric and I got comp tickets to see Dance Chicago, a festival of the best work by the best companies in the city. I am now madly in love with Melissa Thodos & Dancers, especially their works choreographed by Paul Christiano, who uses bodies both as props and as instruments of expression—all with a bold, breathtaking synergy of kinetic energy and poetry. The show also featured some kick-ass, bone-rattling, pound-the-floorboards tap by M.A.D.D. Rhythms. Tap rocks. Especially the way this group does it.

Then this week Matt and I saw All Shook Up, a cheesy musical working its way to Broadway next month. A blatant ripoff of the Mama Mia! format—a silly story written to string together a canon of unrelated songs by one artist (in this case, Elvis instead of ABBA)—the show is eminently predictable, sillier than most but a whole lot of fun. And it features some fabulous sets and powerhouse singing, especially from this handsome fella, whose golden voice is eclipsed only by the piercing beauty of his eyes.

3) I take off Wednesday morning for five days in Iowa with my family. On the docket for this visit: spending a day with my nephew’s kindergarten class, watching my niece’s hit-buckets-with-spoons music class, hours and hours of canasta with any available adult, quality lap time with either of two very friendly kittens, Mom’s home cooking (which, unlike mine, has actual flavor), and a stop at my favorite grocery store (what kind of freak has a favorite grocery store?) on the way home to stock up on milk that costs less than $4 a gallon.

4) The lipo is healing better than I’d expected. I’m happy with the results as they are now, and my doctor says there’s still two more months for the “considerable” swelling to go down. So my waist is only going to get smaller. (But I’m not breaking out the International Male catalogs until I know just what my new measurements will be.) I consider myself fully healed, save for a tiny bit of tightness and some residual numbness around my midsection, and I’m working out at about 90% intensity. The best part: My sad little butt looks almost … butt-like now that it’s not hidden under a gooey pile of love handles.

5) I’m choreographing some numbers for a drag show (January 29 around 8 pm at Hydrate, if you want to go) that’s a fund-raiser for the Chicago Spirit Brigade. My dancers are working their butts off and looking pretty fierce—and the go-go boys backing up one of the numbers are smokin’ hot. And I can make them do whatever touching-each-other-in-sexual-ways things touching-each-other-in-sexual-ways things I want because I am the all-powerful choreographer! Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

6) I just wrote my name in the snow.

Guess what I'm not wearing today:

1) Pants
2) My grandmother's lacy underthings
3) John Ashcroft's sweaty wifebeater that I got on eBay for $17 (a steal!)
4) My freakin' lipo girdle

If you guessed 1 or 2, you're weird. But in a killing hookers in the basement fun kind of way. If you guessed 3, please never read my blog again.

If you guessed 4, you are hereby invited to celebrate a lifetime of ungirdled freedom with me. Woo-hoo!

I just got back from my 11-day checkup—the one where the doctor is supposed to tell me I'm healing nicely but I need to keep squeezing my kidneys down into my rectum wearing the girdle for another week. But instead, he said I'm healing nicely and I am hereby allowed to celebrate life with my tits to the wind (that's just an expression, for the record—I don't actually have tits and if I did I wouldn't let them flap in the wind because it might hurt innocent passers-by attract amorous lesbians and they can be harder to get rid of than fundamentalists and once you have an infestation of either there goes the neighborhood because suddenly it's all flannel and Dockers everywhere you look and you start to feel out of place in your discount couture and god knows nobody wants that) and he doesn't want to see my bruisy, swollen ass again for two months.

So I marched triumphantly—albeit slightly unsteadily since my core muscles had forgotten how to hold me up during the evil Girdle Regime of 2005—out the door and into the street. And I came straight home to blog about it since I have no actual human friends who want to hang out with me to park myself in front of a TiVo hard drive packed with CSI reruns since I have no actual human friends who want to hang out with me.

I also have full permission to head back to the gym but I've decided I like being lazy and I'm going to lounge around and see if I can regrow all that fat which I plan to do tomorrow over lunch. Though I don't think I want to change my shirt in the locker room just yet; my bare midsection is still a little disconcerting to behold—even for the pervy homos who think nobody can tell they're gay straight guys.

In the mean time I'm left to contemplate just how freakin' hairy my tummy gets when I don't shave it. (I've been shaving everything but a saucy little trail that leads south from my belly button for at least 10 years, and I'd forgotten what a teddy bear I'm capable of being. But I didn't shave for a couple weeks before the surgery to pre-empt any itching issues. And I'm not shaving any time in the near future because now my tummy's kind of like that science experiment you did in third grade where you rubbed a piece of Wonder bread on the dusty blinds ostensibly to make mold grow but more likely because the janitor was too lazy to clean the blinds himself because he was busy killing hookers in the basement and I'm curious to see how hairy it actually gets.)

Anyway, we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Jake's gonna finally stop bitching about his freakin' girdle Jake's gonna finally stop bitching about his freakin' girdle. Although, given the shaky state of his core muscles at the moment, your sigh will most likely be louder than his.

Odds and ends

CELEBRITY EQUILIBRIUM
Jude Law is off the market. But Brad Pitt is back on.

I saw Jude Law naked and in person before he was famous. He was in a disturbing little Jean Cocteau play called Indiscretions on Broadway with also-yet-to-be-famous Cynthia Nixon and starring an in-over-her-head Kathleen Turner. Jude (I call him Jude) started Act II in a tub and spent a good part of the opening scene drying off and wandering around the stage looking for his clothes. And I was in the front row. I have never, for the record, seen Brad Pitt in person, naked or otherwise.


THE NEW NOFO
Apparently the sidebar on my new blog template isn't showing up in Inernet Explorer browsers. And I'm not sure what to do about it. But it looks like once again, Microsoft is incompatible with the rest of the world. Imagine that.


NEW FAVORITE MOVIE
I saw the boringly named National Treasure last night with Eric, and we freakin' LOVED IT. A fabulous hybrid of Indiana Jones, Leonardo "Da Vinci" Code and Alastair Cooke, it has everything I love in escapist adventure movies:
• Ancient secrets propelling modern protagonists (and antagonists) from adventure to adventure all over the country
• A quest for long-forgotten treasure that may or may not even exist
• A creepy old ghost ship that—BONUS!—has lain undisturbed under ice for centuries
• Comically implausible plot twists you happily embrace just to keep yourself in on the fun
• Rah-rah American patriotism that makes me tear up with no warning
• Educated scriptwriting peppered with arcane and pretentious historical tidbits
• A wrinkly old (way older-looking than he actually is, at least) leading man who thinks he still reads as virile and sexy paired opposite a nubile young love interest who looks half his age
• A goofy sidekick who just gets cuter and cuter as the movie progresses

If when you go see it, don't be a dork like your friend Jake and make sure you pee first. By the time the movie was over and the butler had killed everyone before being devoured alive by the alien I was markedly uncomfortable—and more than a little worried as I waddled as fast as possible to the bathroom.


LIPO: DAY NINE
The pain is virtually gone (except when I roll over in bed). The swelling has gone down enough that I'm clearly smaller around the middle than when I started (but I'm still puffy and still not so pretty). The bruises are all healed except for the big painful one right on my pubic bone. The giant black porno cock has faded from aubergine through the periwinkle family to its current state, where it looks like I went commando in a new pair of jeans and suffered some minor dye-to-sweaty-crotch transferring. I've more or less gotten used to the girdle, which is good because I may be wearing the damn thing for another week.

And I'm still shocked by the the reactions I've been getting. I thought I was taking the route of admirable honesty by being open about it—instead of giving me undeserved pity for undergoing a mysterious "operation" and undeserved praise for working out so hard when they see the results this summer, people will know up front that 1) I chose to suffer through surgery and recovery and 2) if I look good this summer it will be from a combination of hard work and surgical help. In any case, that honesty is lost on pretty much all the straight guys I work with, who now give me a you're-a-freak look when I talk to them. Yay.

The lipo has also inspired a bunch of blog posts about gay self-image issues—some of them thoughtful and introspective and some of them about the "rage" they feel as gay men when they see guys like me succumb to aesthetic pressure.

I know my inability to write short posts may have clouded my explanation for deciding to go through with lipo, so I'd just like to state it again. And I'll try to be short about it: I had love handles that made me extremely self-conscious and would not respond to more than a decade of eating right, working out regularly and running competitively—including a marathon. I gave it a lot of thought, I did a lot of research, I saved up for five years, and I decided to surgically remove what wasn't going away on its own. While I was going to be having surgery and suffering through recovery anyway, I asked the doctor to also remove the thin layer of fat over my abs while he was in there—though he said it probably wouldn't make a huge difference. But I'd worked hard (waaaaay harder than most, and without the "help" of drugs) and I wanted the body to show for it—for no reason beyond the fact that I simply wanted it, kinda like some people want Hummers or yachts to show off their wealth; it's superfluous and largely symbolic, but I wanted it nonetheless. So I decided to have both procedures done.

I honestly don't see a difference between what I did and someone who gets floppy ears pinned back, a woman who reconstructs her abdomen and breasts after childbirth and breast feeding, HIV patients who have fat injected into their cheeks to mask the effects of wasting, balding men and women with plugs or implants or Propecia prescriptions, people who straighten and whiten perfectly functional teeth—and, to a lesser degree, anyone who's had a piercing, tattoo, body waxing, laser hair removal, tan or even a dye job. We all found something we didn't like about our appearance, and we all had it fixed, with varying degrees of risk but with no degree of necessity.

Anyway, sorry to keep harping on the topic. I'm just genuinely surprised by all of this oddly hostile backlash. But, for the record, I've definitely had my last adventure with plastic surgery.

You’ll probably regret reading this post

because it’s about poop.

And why am I writing an entire post about poop?

1) Poop is funny. Say it with me: P-o-o-o-o-o-o-p. HA! Funny!
2) It’s Sweeps Week for the BOB Awards. And nothing is proven to boost ratings faster—whether we’re talking about Teletubbies or The Rush Limbaugh Drug-Addled Serial Divorcer With Bad Hair And Unpleasant Fans Radio Show—than poop. Plus it gives me the opportunity to say something most bloggers only dream of getting to say: Vote for me! It’s as easy as pooping!
3) Poop is funny even if you don’t actually say “poop.” Example! What can Brown do for you? HA!
4) Poop issues figure into the whole lipo process more than I’d anticipated.
5) Remember: P-o-o-o-o-o-o-p! HA! Funny!


WHEW! Amid all that funny pre-poop talk, I almost forgot to get to the whole point. And, actually, there are two points to this post. So here’s the (ahem) poop:


NUMBER ONE
The night before the lipo, I did a pre-emptive poop because I figured pooping after the surgery wouldn’t exactly be a box of kittens. (And I was right, but more on that later. If you can get that far.) And I tried again the morning of the lipo, but I didn’t have to go.

So I got to the hospital, got checked in, got into my gown and my extra-fancy stick-on underpants, got the IV thing stuck in the back of my hand—and as they were walking me to the operation room, I suddenly kinda felt like I had to go. But it was too late.

So I climbed on the table, got knocked unconscious, underwent The Change, and woke up all groggy and begirdled in the recovery room. And I mysteriously didn’t have to poop anymore.

Which was the least of my worries … until I got up to get dressed and I found a stain on the sheets where my butt had just been. And while the stain could very easily have been I-just-had-surgery blood, I to this day live in mortal fear that the damn spot was glowing, screaming, mocking proof that the anesthesia had turned me into a human soft-serve ice cream dispenser and I pooped on everything and everyone in the operating room the whole time I was being vacuumed.

(I can just hear it: “Nurse, hand me the scalpel … cotton swab … suction thingie … whoa, gross! Hand me the ice cream cone … STAT!”)

What makes it worse (if you can imagine this story getting worse) is the fact that I didn’t poop for a full two days after the surgery. Which just proves to me that I emptied the ol’ tank all over the doctor’s Ferragamos when all he thought he was in for were a few splashes of hip goo. I’m so embarrassed I could just shit.


NUMBER TWO (Ha! More poop humor!)
Pooping in a girdle is harder than I thought. The next time you’re parked on the throne, pay attention to what you naturally do with your body: You slouch forward (presumably to pull your curtains apart and aim your cannon at the hole in the bottom of the toilet).

Now imagine doing that in a corset. Right. It doesn’t work. You have to sit as straight and tall as (ahem) Gary Bauer. What’s more, you have to keep your feet directly under your torso (on either side of the bowl) so you don’t topple backward into the tank. Which means you have to take your pants completely off. Just to poop. (Remember: You pooped all over an entire medical team just a few days earlier. The indignities don’t end!)

And then consider this: If every muscle in your midsection is angrily recovering from a li-pokefest (lipo-kefest? is this attempt at portmanteau even funny?) … if every muscle in your midsection is further weakened by a corset that grips tighter than Paris Hilton with a school bus in her vagina … then you don’t have a lot of firepower for squeezing out your puppies, if you know what I mean.

And that’s when poop abortion starts looking like an ethical option—Vatican be damned! (Vatican be damned anyway, but that’s a topic for a different post about poop.)

WHEW. So that’s all I have to say on this topic for the day. (Lucky you.) Except for this: Vote for me! It’s as easy as pooping!

Lipo: Day Five

In which our hero jumps back into life and recounts in graphic—and cringingly inappropriate—detail the recovery process from his hopelessly misguided attempts to make men love him liposuction.

All in the name of giving his lipo-curious readers an in-the-trenches perspective on what it’s like, of course.

DRUGS
I didn’t take them last night. My low-level pain hadn’t changed all day, so I climbed into bed after watching the news and fell right asleep without any chemical help whatsoever. I have a couple more days on my precautionary antibiotics, but otherwise I’m back to being completely pill-free.

SLEEP
I woke up on my side this morning. And I don’t remember heaving myself painfully into that position in the night. Woo-hoo! But the spot I was lying on—where the little fucker love handle used to be—was pretty sore from being crushed for however long I was sleeping on it. Warning! Too much information ahead! I also woke up with a … um … functional … um … “friend” that … um … needed attention. So we can all breathe a sigh of relief and dismiss our haunting fears on that topic.

RECOVERY
The doctor had warned me I would be tired after my first full day back at work. “Hogwash,” I’d thought at the time. “I’m always brimming with vim and vigor and other outdated phrases that reveal my rapidly advancing age.” But when 2:00 rolled around yesterday … YAWN. I was pretty worthless the whole afternoon. And when I got home last night I cuddled up on the couch with a blanket, a bunch of corset-friendly pillows, a giant glass of water and the remote and watched three hours of Very Bad TV—including some in-the-field reality-type program on Beverly Hills plastic surgeons and their archetypal patients. (On this episode: the Demanding Jewess Who’d Sued Her Last Plastic Surgeon, the Model Whose Small Boobs Were Undermining Her Marketability and the Ugly Woman Who Thought Her Perfectly Fine Nose Was The Problem When In Reality It Was Everything But Her Nose.) I was too tired to let any irony register in my muddled head.

And my giant black porno cock? It’s still there—only the bruise blood is slowly dissipating and now it’s more like a giant aubergine porno cock. If I could somehow remove and stuff it, it would make a lovely lumbar pillow on one of my morel-colored chenille club chairs.

RESULTS
When I finally took the corset off Sunday night, my first impulse was to collapse on the floor because OH MY GOD ALL THE MUSCLES IN MY MIDSECTION HAD ATROPHIED TO NOTHING AND I COULDN’T HOLD MYSELF UP ANYMORE. But I steadied myself against the wall and took my first look in the mirror. And what I saw was neither good nor bad.

First of all, the little fuckers love handles are definitely gone. But in their place are funky purple bruises stretching out in every direction from my hips like creepy handprints. There’s also a curious bruise on my coccyx (heh, heh … coccyx) that looks like it reaches down between my buttcheeks. I have no idea what it’s from—and it doesn’t hurt—so I’ll just dismiss it as a chafing burn from my surgical stick-on underpants.

My abs look better than my backside. They’re not defined—and they probably won’t be until the swelling completely subsides, which could take three months—but they’re not too bruised. And the whole area looks definitely smaller and tighter. Which was the whole point. (Permit me a cautious smile here.)

The only other bruise is right on my pubic bone where the doctor made his incision. It’s a big ugly bruise—and the only one that’s really puffy and sore—and it stretches out laterally across my pelvis and points triangularly down toward my huge aubergine porno cock. At first glance it looks like I have a giant black muff hidden under my manpubes—like a long-forgotten cache of WMDs in a sparse Iraqi forest. But it, too, is slowly dissipating. Though the bottom of the corset keeps pressing into it, which is NOT a happy feeling.

THE WEIRDEST PART
The weirdest part so far is this: When I take the corset off for my brief showers, my whole midsection feels like … well … like it’s not mine. I can neither hold in my gut nor let it all hang out—though that could be from wearing a very tight corset 23.75 hours a day. I’ve never been ticklish, but when I touch myself (heh, heh … touch myself) through the corset my whole body surges with goosebumps. But when the corset is off my whole midsection is completely numb. Which is what I was told to expect, so I’m not concerned.

THE OTHER WEIRDEST PART
The other weirdest part is this: I can’t believe I actually went through with it. I’ve been thinking and talking about sawing off my don’t-respond-to-diet-and-exercise love handles for at least 10 years—and saving up for it for about 5 years. But it was always this carrot dangling far out in my future: If you can’t erase your stubborn trouble spots naturally, it seemed to say with its little carrot mouth, there’s always lipo.

HA! Like I’d ever have lipo!

Lipo: Day Three

So it's been three full days since the surgery. For all of you who've sent well-wishes and inquiries about my recovery, I'm great, thanks. A little uncomfortable, but great. And you ROCK for being so concerned. For the insignificant handful of you who've expressed anonymous (why are you folks always anonymous?) desire to see me rot in hell for my unquenchable vanity, um ... my abs are more ripped than yours so your opinions don't count.

And for the vast majority of you who have asked tons of questions about the good, the bad and the ugly involved in recovering from lipo, you're in luck! Because I'm about to blather on and on endlessly on the topic:

DRUGS
I'm on the same pain medication that turned our virtuous friend Rush Limbaugh into a hypocrite victim—an innocent victim—of drug addiction. The bottle says to take my drugs as-needed, but—aside from the first night and the first morning—my overall pain level has been hovering around the mere-discomfort level. And the drugs make me as rational as a right-wing talk-show host with three divorces and a drug problem loopy, and I don't like to be loopy. So I just take them at night to help me sleep. Besides, I kind of like being aware of the pain—it gives me a more honest perspective on my recovery. So as long as the pain isn't debilitating, I don't see any reason to mask it.

SPEAKING OF SLEEP
While the last-shred-of-Rush-Limbaugh's-credibility memorial drugs seem to help me get to sleep, the dull pain that flares up every time I wiggle—along with the fact that I'm in the least pain only when I'm on my back and I'm not a back sleeper—helps me wake up about 500 times a night. I did manage to heave myself over onto my side last night—a triumph!—but the pressure on the spot where the love handle used to be created a rotting ache that quickly forced me back onto my back. Baby steps ...

BRUISING
The one unpleasant side effect of recovery—leftover bruise blood following gravity to my scrotum—is manifesting itself a little differently from what I was told to expect. Instead of turning my nutsack into a saggy purple man-tit, the blood is following a slightly more ventral path, giving me instead a huge black porno cock. It doesn't hurt, and it's strangely compelling to behold—but if I hadn't been told to expect something like this I'd probably be freaking out about now. (And, for the record, I've opted NOT to take pictures of it. Because the last thing I need is to have those pictures all over the Internet when I'm trying to run for Miss America.)

THE GIRDLE
The girdle thing is still on tight, and it's still holding the absorbent contouring pads in place where the fat used to be. And it's still giving me the posture of a Victorian spinster. With a Galileo thermometer up her ass. I was told before the surgery that I should avoid slouching in the girdle at all costs because it might make the skin grow back in funny (to everyone but me) flaps. Fortunately, slouching is NOT an option in this contraption. (Smelling like a bedpan, unfortunately, still is.)

The discharge papers I got at the hospital said specifically NOT to remove the girdle until my checkup on January 10. But the nurse called me this afternoon and gave me permission to remove it—and the stinky pads, which I can throw away—long enough to shower tonight if I wanted. Which I am SO going to do.

PANTS
I still can't get my pants buttoned over the girdle. Maybe once the pads are out. If not, I'll be going to work in sweat pants this week. Klassy!

AN UNEXPECTED REVELATION
I've had surgery twice in my life: I got my tonsils out in kindergarten and I got my wisdom teeth out in high school. Other than that, I've never been in a hospital, I've never been sicker than a mild case of the flu, I've never taken more than one sick day a year (usually for a migraine)—and I've never had much empathy for the frustrating inertia of people who are chronically ill. I have a distant family member who is ALWAYS sick; she's had something like 30 major surgeries in her 30-year life. And I've never quite understood how she couldn't just bounce out of bed and jump back into life once she'd spent enough time recovering. And now I understand how pain and discomfort and exhaustion—and drug side effects—can zap your energy and render you pretty useless. For what it's worth.

WOULD I DO IT AGAIN?
Probably not. While I'm thrilled I actually made my self-perceived "problem" go away—and though I feel fully justified about it after discovering that eating right and running a marathon weren't going to do it for me—the fact remains that I spent a lot of money on a potentially dangerous operation that I absolutely didn't need. Warning! Gray Area Ahead! I have no regrets about doing it, though, and I'm psyched to see how it all turns out. But the pain and the isolation and the months of recovery—at least from my perspective three days after the surgery—ultimately aren't worth it. I fully reserve the right to change my mind, though. And I probably wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from doing it if he or she had equally valid reasons, realistic expectations and responsible financing.

Now I'm off to my shower—and my first peek at my results ...

Resolutions

• Repair the giant gap where the outside wall of my condo is ripping away from the inside wall. (The building engineer assures me it's a cosmetic thing and not a structural thing, but the gap makes it look exactly like the back of the building is falling off and one of these days I'm going to come home to a giant, breezy window 24 stories in the sky.)

• Change the HVAC filters. (It's been four years. It's probably about time.)

• Learn to use a punching bag. There's one in my gym. All the cool kids can do that BA-da-da-da-BA-da-da-da rhythm with it. I sure can't. Yet.

• Heal from lipo and never do it again. Right now, I'm in this weird place between sheepish incredulousness over having spent a ton of money on an unnecessary, invasive procedure and ecstatic relief over actually getting rid of something that has bothered the shit out of me for at least 10 years. (It may end up looking great, but right now it hurts and that's cutting into my fun. And I'd rather spend my time having fun.) Judging from the feedback I've gotten here, your opinions cover an even broader spectrum on the topic—from surprise to congratulations to curiosity to admiration (?) to irrational, immature, sometimes vicious (and always anonymous) personal attacks. (Hey, if you don't like me, don't read my blog. Duh.)

• Get rid of at least 100 things that are cluttering up my house: clothes I never wear, books I'll never read again, CDs and DVDs I never really liked in the first place, sheets and blankets and towels and coats that other people need more than I do, knickknacks that mean nothing to me ... I'm tired of feeling constantly beholden to my stuff. And tripping over it.

• Run a 5K in under 8-minute miles.

• Run the Chicago Marathon in under four hours.

• Learn enough Web design that I can make a Web site of my own.

• Get my long-dormant book published and/or my old newspaper column revived and syndicated.

• Continue in my personal quest to demonstrate to the world that gay people aren't abstract "threats" to the common good but are human beings who contribute to society and pay taxes and feel real pain when we're insulted and vilified and lied about and beaten and used as political pawns and voted into inequality.

Lipo: An adventure in words and pictures

WEDNESDAY NIGHT
I'm not allowed to eat or drink anything after midnight, and I'm a thirsty bird who lives in the Condo of Dryness. ACK! So I chug glass after glass of water after I wash down my favorite meal (peanut butter and jelly) and some pre-surgery herbal drug that's supposed to prevent swelling and promote healing. I also realize I'll probably have bending-over issues for a while, so I pick up everything off the floor I think I'll need in the next few days. And before I go to bed, I scrub my fatty areas with special anti-bacterial soap. I'm so excited, though—I've been thinking about doing this for YEARS and it's finally happening—that I can barely sleep.

6:00 AM THURSDAY
I wake up PARCHED. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I take a pre-emptive poop (thinking the first post-surgery one might not be the bowl-of-kittens kind of fun that poop usually is) and another anti-bacterial shower. Then I put on a doctor-recommended button-up shirt (in a dark color in case I ooze); pack an overnight bag with DVDs, stretchy-waisted pants and a dark towel (so as not to ooze on Matthew's 8-billion-thread-count sheets); and head downstairs to wait for Matthew to pick me up.

7:30 AM
We check in and I wait to be called in for surgery. And Matthew whips out his camera to begin recording every moment of the day.


Feeling fat. But not for long.


See that? Get a good look. Because that stubborn, unwelcome band of goo is now in some sewer or medical incinerator or fly-infested dumpster. Or maybe some thrifty indigenous peoples are using it to make soap. In any case, as you read this the stuff is gone from my life like a bad stalker who fell down an elevator shaft. Not that that's ever happened to me.


Stick-on underpants. As in Stick. On. Underpants. It took me awhile to figure out how they worked. And I hate to complain, but they were NOT flattering. But they made it easy for the doctor to draw all over me—just like they do on TV!


Cotton robes. Non-skid socks. Heated blankets. It's just like Spa Day. Except they cut you.


Waking up from anesthesia is NOT pretty. And I don't even remember going under. When I had my wisdom teeth out in high school, the anesthesiologist told me to count back from 100. By the time I got to 96 the surgery was over and I didn't remember a thing. On Lipo Day, I remember climbing on the operating table and being told to rest my arms on the little wings like they have on lethal injection tables—and the next thing I knew I was groggy and begirdled in the recovery bed. And my stick-on underpants were missing.


As soon as the anesthesia wore off, I remembered how freakin' THIRSTY I was—and I chugged water like it was, well, water. And when I got home, I peed like 10 times in the first few hours. The nurse said to expect that because my IV and all the fat-melting liquid they inject in the lipo spots would eventually turn into pee. How cool is THAT?


I don't think I've ever ridden in a wheelchair before. I don't think I ever want to again.


Ho! Ho! Ho! My girdle thing is packed with strategically placed foam to keep the loose skin pressed into the spaces where the fat used to be so it grows onto the muscle underneath. Which, ironically, makes me look even fatter than before. Tack on the surgery hair and the bloody IV band-aid—not to mention that matched set of shoulder zits—and I'm just a hunka burnin' man-meat.


Coming soon to a computer screen near you: A picture of Jake showing off his SHREDDED abs. I hope. (And yes, that's my underwear, looking like little more than an ill-fitting black diaper with a label-whore waistband. Sexy!)

I spent yesterday recuperating in Matthew's fabulous Gold Cost condo, eating like a king, pissing like a racehorse and bravely forgoing my as-needed pain meds. Until bedtime. Trying to lower myself from vertical to horizontal was more than my macho I-don't-need-no-stinkin'-drugs posturing could bear, and I quickly loaded up on the suckers. But I couldn't sleep very well—probably because I'm used to sleeping on my side, which was out of the question, and maybe because the anesthesia messed with my sleep patterns. And when morning came and Matthew had to physically lift me out of bed (which he admitted was not the Jake-and-Matthew-in-bed scenario he'd been picturing) I quickly chowed down on even more pain meds. Which promptly made me loopy and weird. And I hate being loopy and weird. Which is exactly why I don't drink or take party drugs.

Anyway, in between loopy weirdness, frequent trips to the bathroom and Matthew's fabulous cooking, we did 7-step chemical face peels (I had lipo and a chemical face peel in the same day—I'm that gay) and watched two DVDs:
• Latter Days is much better than I'd expected, given that wide-release gay love stories tend to be awkwardly written, poorly acted and scrubbed clean of any homo verisimilitude that could frighten the wimmen and children. I have to say, though, that Jacqueline Bisset is looking like she's had too much work done on her face (people who get plastic surgery are so shallow) and her touching emotional outburst outside the hospital is anything but. And the two leads? Um ... WOOF.
• Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There was a gift to me by my boss. It's quite fascaniting—if you're a shameless show-tune queen like I am—though it is a little more talking-heady than I'd hoped. (Bring on the dance numbers!) I love hearing actors talk in their own words, though, and while I find that movie actors tend to be a rather dull bunch, stage actors are usually articulate, well-read, passionate and fascinating to listen to. And this movie gave us almost two hours of that fabulous pleasure last night.

So that's it. A year that started on 1/23 with LASIK ended on 12/30 with lipo. (And how cosmic is that little number coincidence? Spooky!) Now it's a freakin' GORGEOUS day in Chicago—though I don't think I'd get very far if I went outside to enjoy it—and I'm facing New Year's Eve wih a stack of DVDs and a TiVo hard drive loaded with unseen South Park episodes. And the ever-present risk that I could just fall asleep and miss all the fun.

See you next year! (GOD—that joke never stops being funny!)

All sucked!

The desperate attempt to somehow compensate for everything that's missing in my life lipo went smashingly well this morning! The pain's not too bad -- though it is a bit of a challenge to stand and sit -- and I'm having no issues with nausea or rotting flesh. But I'm in a girdle thingie that I'm not allowed to remove for almost two weeks, which means no showers, no manscaping (at least no wash-everything-effortlessly-down-the-drain manscaping) and no hope for achieving that walking-along-the-beach-in-soft-focus fresh feeling until the 10th. Is there NO end to my suffering?

I'm convalescing until tomorrow afternoon in dear, dear Matthew's fabulous Gold Cost condo -- and he's pampering me with home-cooked meals cuisine, spa facial treatments, thoroughly illegal custom CDs from his obsessive extensive music collection, and paparazzi-level photographic records of my adventure.

But the poor unfortunate soul doesn't have a decent computer in his house, and I'm forced to surf and post on his dainty little laptop. And Jake and his meaty paws HATE laptops. So I'm not even going to try to post pictures, embed links or spend another minute typing "anf" instead of "and" today. But I'll be home tomorrow with nothing to do but play on my mouse-enhanced computer, post pictures, and blather on and on about how my nutsack is supposed to fill with bruise blood and turn frightening -- albeit harmless -- shades of purple before this whole thing is over. Hey -- nobody said trying to be pretty actually IS pretty.

On another note, I am thoroughly humbled by -- and deeply thankful for -- my nomination and finalist status for the blog award I'm too laptop-tarded to add as a link here. So you have a gushing earful (eyeful?) on THAT topic to look forward to as well.

In the mean time, much love to all of you -- faithful readers, nomination elves and people who have found admirably diplomatic ways to tell me they thought I was hot as-was and I'm more or less a fool-and-his-money fool for having plastic surgery -- from Lipo Land! (Thank you for all your kind words. Sincerely. But for the record, I have no regrets about today, and I'm PSYCHED to see how it all looks. Once the nutsack thing resolves itself, of course.)

XO
Jake

What are you doing tomorrow morning at 8:30?

I’ll be blissfully unconscious as a doctor pokes me full of holes and sucks out mound after jiggly mound of stubborn, unsightly fat from my lower back and abdomen. (Click here—if you dare—to see the hideous disfigurement man repellant mushy goo I’ve spent the last 20 years working very hard to hide from the rest of the world.)

That’s right: I’m having liposuction. Plastic surgery. Body image issues. A vanity crisis. “A little work done,” as they say in more polite circles.

And I’m fucking STOKED about it!


Everybody who makes the decision to fork over a sizeable chunk of money to undergo an invasive—and wholly unnecessary—surgical procedure like this has a litany of rationales for doing so. Here are mine:

• I have worked out with medium to heavy intensity five days a week since I graduated from college in 1990, pushing my once-skeletal 6'1" frame from 151 lbs to a peak of 203 five years ago. I’ve leveled off around 190 since then, and I don’t see myself ever getting any more muscular. Though I keep trying.

• My diet is, for the most part, exemplary. I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t eat crap like Twinkies and potato chips and candy, I barely drink pop, I indulge in fatty desserts only if they’re among my few favorites (like molten chocolate soufflés and Breyer’s vanilla ice cream)—and what I do eat falls into the vegetables/fruits/lean meats/skim milk/egg whites category.

• I’ve been running regularly for 10 years, and I enter three or four serious races every summer. I always take the stairs. If I’m going somewhere that’s under three train stops away, I walk. I ran a frickin’ marathon this year.

• Despite all of this, my love handles (the lipo doctor calls them “flanks”) have sat defiantly on my hips since high school, immovable (aside from their constant jiggling) and undeterred by all my healthy living and obsessive exercise.

So the biggest reason I’m getting the fuckers sucked out for good is that I’ve earned the right to parade around with ripped abs and a tiny waist.


Of course, there are other reasons as well:

• The love handles bother me so much that I almost never take my shirt off in public. I haven’t worn a swimsuit in three years.

• I’m not really keen on being naked in front of other guys. Despite what my reputation would have you believe.

• I’m clearly a victim of the ubiquitous body fascism that keeps gay men—and, apparently, straight men as well—filled with self-loathing and the unquenchable desire to have lipo and take steroids. (Though I am NOT in any danger of taking steroids. I don’t do any drugs, remember? Besides, I like my big balls and smooth skin and even temper just the way they are.)

• And I’m not kidding myself here: A smaller waist will attract hotter men. I hope. And though I’m fully aware these won’t necessarily be quality men, I plan on enjoying their attention to the fullest of my ability.


I have been surprised, though, at the almost white-hot anger this topic has inspired in some of my friends. I had no intention of keeping it a secret—I saw lipo as just another interesting adventure in my never-let-myself-get-bored life—but some of my friends have gotten seriously, voice-raisingly mad at me for even thinking about it. So now I bring it up only when I absolutely have to (as in “I can’t come in to work on our week off because I’m having surgery”) and, if pressed for details, I evasively refer to it as “back surgery.”

As I’ve stated here repeatedly, I don’t go into debt for anything beyond a mortgage—and maybe a car payment when my 10-year-old Neon finally goes to that shady Dodge dealer in the sky. And something as frivolous as lipo is no exception to that rule. I opened what I half-jokingly called my lipo fund four years ago, and I’ve auto-deposited a couple hundred bucks a month into it since then. I told myself that when it got past five grand—the point where I could actually write a check for the procedure—I’d see if I still really wanted to go through with it. Well, I hit five grand early this fall, and I realized I’d been thinking about it constantly all that time. So I researched doctors, made an appointment, got a quote and decided to pull the trigger a month ago. I even opened a credit card with a 0% APR for 16 months so I could pay it off in interest-free installments and keep my lipo fund liquid (so to speak) and interest-bearing as long as possible.


And the buyer’s remorse I thought I’d get when I made my non-refundable payment two weeks ago? Forget about it! I’ve had nothing but buyer’s giddy excitement! The little fuckers that have been fighting my every attempt at 30-inch-waistdom are going DOWN tomorrow. They’re going down HARD and they’re going down for GOOD.

And—if you can stomach it—I’ll give you all the gory details (with pictures!) of my surgery, recovery and re-emergence as Small Waist Man this summer. Just in time for thong season!