I’m off to work pumped full of pain blockers, anti-inflammatories, antihistamines and steroidal inhalants

... and an admonition to check for signs of bleeding kidneys.

My headache pain is only slightly better—and probably masked by all the aforementioned pharmaceuticals—and bending over to put on my socks this morning was one step closer to NOT making me pass out.

Thanks for all your kind words and expressions of concern and support. And to those of you who suggested yoga: I dare you to even THINK about doing downward dog with a Richter-scale sinus headache. But you’re not wrong that I should probably get back into doing yoga. Just not in the foreseeable future where my head might explode and I might die of urethral exsanguination.

HEADACHE UPDATE:

I got a shot of Toredol industrial-strength painkiller in my shoulder this morning, and OHMYGODITHURT. It took its sweet time killing the pain in my head—and it never killed the pain from the damn shot—and now, just seven hours later, it’s quickly wearing off. I feel my eyes trying to cross as I type this.

I finally got my CT scan at 4:30, and apparently there’s nothing remarkable in my head. So I’m back to ingesting mountains of painkillers and snorting gallons of squirty sinus stuff, as they say in the ouch-my-head-hurts medical world. And in the mean time I just saw—and subsequently googled to discern the marital status of—Rob Marciano and Will Carr reporting on the ABC Nightly News. In summary: They’re both hot, they’re both married, and they’re both not offering to provide curative hugs and kisses to me and my achy head.

When you clean out your spice cupboard and discover you’ve accidentally been running an opium den

What the hell do gay people have to be proud of?

On this, the Gay High Holidays of the Tony Awards, I offer again my annual explanation and celebration of what gay pride means from my own journey and my own experience and my own big-ol’-proud-gay-man perspective:

We’re proud because despite relentless persecution everywhere we turn—when organized religion viciously attacks and censures and vilifies us in the name of selective morality, when our families disown us, when our elected officials bargain away our equality for hate votes they try to disguise as so-called “religious liberty,” when communities and cities and entire states codify our families into second-class citizenship, when small-importance bakers with the backing of the big-money hate industry take their unhinged loathing of us all the way to the Supreme Court, when our employers fire us, when our landlords evict us, when our police harass us, when our neighbors and colleagues and fellow citizens openly insult and condemn and mock and berate and even beat and kill us—we continue to survive.

We’re proud because pride is the opposite of shame—and despite what systemic bigotry and the ugliest sides of organized religion work so hard to make the world believe, there is nothing shameful about being gay. We’re proud because—thanks to the incredible bravery shown by gay people who lived their lives openly sometimes to the point of being defiantly in the decades before us—we can live our lives more and more openly at home, at work, with our families, on social media … and even on national television.

We're proud because we've worked tirelessly to achieve legal equality in marriage, adoption, parental rights and many other ways that make our families recognized as Families in our states and across our country. And though we have much more to accomplish—and though bigotry disguised as morality and religion and the supposed mandates of constituents work and sometimes succeed at eroding our newfound equalities—we have the momentum and intelligence and drive and humanity and ability to keep driving back the hate as we continue to drive forward with both our newfound and future equalities.

We’re proud because through our tireless work and the prevailing powers of common sense and compassion, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and Proposition Hate and the so-called Defense of Marriage Act have collapsed in on their illogical, immoral, meritless foundations—and new legislative attempts to dehumanize us gain little to no traction or visibility and soon die on the trash heap as well.

We’re proud because we are smart enough to overcome the self-loathing that our venomous, mindlessly theocratic society forces on us, and we have the power to stop its destructive cycle by fighting back and by making intelligent choices involving sex and drugs and money and relationships and the way we live our lives—and by using our lives as examples of success and humanity and love that other gay people can see and respect and emulate and achieve more and more easily.

We’re proud because after all we’ve been through, the world increasingly continues to notice and respect us and enthusiastically appropriate the often fabulous culture we’ve assembled from the common struggles and glorious diversity of our disparate lives.

We’re proud because more and more often and in more and more contexts our country and our culture see the fact that we’re gay as frankly boring.

We’re proud because especially this month and always all year we’re celebrating with parties and street fairs and parades overflowing with drag queens, leather queens, muscle queens, dad-bod queens, glitter queens, you’d-never-even-know-they-were-queens queens and even straight-but-honorary-queens-for-a-day queens, and together we can see beyond the pride in the parades of our lives and together celebrate the underlying Pride in the parades of our lives.

Quite simply, we’re proud that we have so incredibly much to be proud of.

Things I learned today in Manhattan:

• A ten-minute pedi-cab ride COSTS SEVENTY DOLLARS. That’s not a typo, and since the rates were carefully hidden up-front, there wasn’t a tip-o.

• It’s perfectly fine to look at the headshots in a Broadway program and then read the bios in the order of who’s cutest. Just as long as you don’t broadcast that you’re doing it on social media.
• It is all but impossible to walk a block in Manhattan without passing through a cloud of marijuana smoke.
• Also, Manhattan is so crowded that even if you’re completely certain that you’ve found a secluded spot in, say, a corner of a theater lobby to, say, quietly relieve yourself of a little gas, you’ll notice as soon as you’re done that someone had also ducked into that same corner to squat down behind you to tie his shoe.
• If you’re afraid to stop and crane your neck and look like a tourist, you’ll miss a lot of breathtaking architecture.
• We’re back in a golden age of Broadway belters who don’t need microphones to overpower an orchestra and throw you against the back wall on the money notes.
• Our hotel hallway is missing a set of gingham-clad twins asking Danny to come play with them.
• Seriously: I GOT SCAMMED INTO PAYING SEVENTY DOLLARS TODAY FOR A TEN-MINUTE PEDI-CAB RIDE.

#HowToTurn50 #AndBlithelyFartOnStrangers

ADDENDUM:

• There is nothing more valuable in life than a friend who understands you AND understands how to use Photoshop.

It’s alarming how charming I feel

When you have an oven fire and you had to cut the wires to the hard-wired smoke alarm system because the smoke alarms WOULDN’T STOP SCREAMING AT YOU and the house won’t stop smelling like the contestants on Bottom Chef so you have to buy oven cleaner that chaps the life out of your hands and Lysol that barely starts to work after a day of repeated sprayings and battery-powered smoke detectors that require you to accept the challenge of capping off the electrical source though you still can’t find it and removing the hard-wired smoke detectors first which really should be done by a stable genius and did I mention how chapped my hands are and how smoke-alarming the house smells and that the guy at the hardware store — who is older than I am — somehow managed to turn our conversation about oven cleaner into a recommendation that I should try marijuana?

#FireAndFury
#FireAndFuckThisShit

Flashback Saturday: Marathon Injuries Edition

Bragging rights: I'm incredibly proud that I've run seven marathons, and while I've stopped just blurting it out in song to strangers on the street, I still get a kick out of telling people about it whenever running comes up in a conversation.

If you've met me in person, though, you know I'm not built like a runner. I'm tall and weighty (and unfortunately getting weightier as I age), which absolutely excludes me from ever being (or even enjoying being) a sprinter. But twelve years ago, after discovering the joys of running for fun and fitness on Chicago's 17-mile trail along Lake Michigan, I noticed that longer distances were getting easier and easier to run ... so I took a deep breath of trepidation and registered to run the Chicago Marathon. The experience was supposed to be a bucket-list one-and-done, but I was so moved to tears by what I'd worked to accomplish just to cross the starting line that I vowed I'd keep doing it until I got too bored or too injured.

Well, duh. Injured. You can't spell marathon without injured. And though I'd survived my first marathon from my first official training run all the way through to the finish line -- which I did pretty much cluelessly all by myself with no official training program and no running buddies -- without a single injury, I started falling apart regularly every year after that. Especially in my feet. Oh, and in my ankles. Oh, and in my knees too. But -- unlike every endurance runner past, present and future -- I thankfully never had to endure the misery of chafed, bleeding nipples.

I just said nipples.

Anyway, Facebook just reminded me of a particularly troubling injury I had eight years ago -- mere days before I was due to run my fifth Chicago Marathon -- where the top of my right foot suddenly grew a painfully tender ostrich egg. I got an emergency appointment with one of Chicago's leading running doctors -- named-for-the-wrong-body-part Dr. Chin -- and learned that I had stress fractures in all my metatarsals; my body had built up a gelatinous goo of cartilage to protect it; and the muscles, tendons and fatty myelin sheathing around the nerves in my foot had started to swell in reaction to everything as though I'd had a sprain. And there was no way it was going away before the race.

But! Apparently it was a not-uncommon injury, and Dr. Chin showed me how to take care of Mr. Foot by icing it day and night, popping ibuprofen like Rush Limbaugh at a rave, saying words like analgesic and ouch, and lacing my right running shoe across my toes, up the sides and then across the top to minimize pressure on my precious baby ostrich while still maintaining a locked-in fit that would keep my foot from slipping and flopping as I ran.

And it worked! I was miserable for the entire four-plus (but still not five, because five is just embarrassing in the cool running circles) hours I ran, but I finished, I got my medal, I did my traditional walking-backward-down-the-steps-because-I-didn't-trust-my-knees-to-bend-forward-without-an-ugly-topple to find a cab on Michigan Avenue, and I went home to whimper. And stink. And shower. And keep whimpering. And then eat four pints of Ben & Jerry's in alphabetical order according to flavor name. Seriously. Because that's how I rolled after I ran each marathon. Or limped. Whatever.

The 2017 Chicago Marathon is tomorrow. And while I feel injured just from typing that sentence, I'm still thrilled that I was a part of it for so long. And I'm even more thrilled for all my friends from across the country who have trained all summer and are running this glorious -- and gloriously flat -- race this weekend. And whether you're a first-timer or a veteran and whether you're injured or in perfect working order, I hope you all enjoy every moment of the experience -- from the enormous expo to the cheering Boystown throngs at the best water station on the entire route to that cruel, cruel hill on Roosevelt Road at mile 25.9 to the mountains of free bananas in the finishers corral. You rock, I'm already proud of you ... and get ready to start blurting out your bragging rights in song to every stranger on the street.

#Threefer

It worked! I don't have an opioid addiction! Praise #MAGA!

I guess you could call this a very good day

The photo shoot.
Six words: I should do this every day. I spent an hour an a half being LOVED by these people. Someone brought me water, someone picked out my wardrobe and STEAMED it for me, someone fussed over my hair and makeup and lighting, someone fussed over my clothes every time I shifted my body in front of the camera, the photographers kept telling me how hot I looked and cracked jokes and acted like they were having the best time of their lives taking my pictures ... and now I officially want to be a full-time model. It really IS the high-glamour lifestyle we'd all suspected it was! I also now have two names to drop:

1. Hunter Hillenmeyer, a Chicago Bears linebacker, had his pictures taken after mine. The man has amazing eyes and a pretty decent body. But he's all of 23 years old, and I'm guessing he could buy and sell me. And I learned that while most of us anonymous Top 20 Singles were nominated and picked based on our personalities/profiles/looks, people like Hunter were ringers specifically recruited by Chicago magazine to add star power and increase sales. So I can't decide if I should be insulted that I'm not a big enough name to sell magazines (as if) or extremely flattered that I was picked to appear among some certifiably famous locals.

2. Nate Berkus, who is apparently Oprah's favorite designer and quite an accomplished young business man to boot, is now a potential blind date for me. One of the photographers today is friends with him, and she insisted that he and I would make a great couple. I told her to fix us up and she seemed genuinely excited at the prospect, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Because I'm gay, I also feel obligated to mention that I got in a pretty killer chest workout yesterday and a major killer arm workout today so my guns would look their buffest in all the tight short-sleeved shirts I packed for the photo shoot. Of course, of all the 20 shirts I brought along, the stylist picked one of the two long-sleeved ones for the pic. I just thought I should mention that.

One more piece of news: After all my fretting about having to bring "something special to me" to the shoot, they decided not to use any of the crap we lugged to the studio for our photos. Whew.

The run.
I got home from the shoot at 5:30 -- which gave me plenty of time to get in a nice long run before my dream date with Steve. And what a gorgeous day for it! The weather was perfect, the trees were in bloom, the lilacs were flowering and deliciously fragrant, the sky was a gorgeous blue rivaled only by the shimmering blues of the lake, and I just kept drinking in the sheer fabulousness of it all and pounding away until I'd gotten in a good six miles. And now my thighs are screaming.

The date.
Ah, the date. Steve picked me up promptly at 7:30 in his sexy black SUV, and he took me to Hopleaf, a nearby tavern/restaurant that serves delicious Belgian food and offers an endless menu of Belgian beers. He looked amazing -- even more amazing than I'd remembered. Better still, he had interesting things to talk about, he's traveled all over the world, he was unfailingly polite, he was absolutely fascinated by me and our conversation was effortless -- until we got to the topic of the gay cruise I took two years ago. Which got us to circuit parties in general and then drugs in specific. And it turns out he's an unapologetic (and rather proud, actually) drug user. AAAAARRRRRGGGHHHHH! (I was profoundly disappointed by this revelation, but it sure took the pressure off as far as me trying to make a longstanding romantic impression -- and I spent the rest of the night just enjoying our date.) Anyway, it didn't spell the end of our evening, which also took us to an obscure little bar where he wanted to hear a friend of his give (of all things) an accordion concert -- but he had the wrong night and the place was deserted when we got there -- and eventually Pause, a cute little coffee shop just around the corner from my place.

Then we got to the sitting-in-his-car-in-front-of-my-place conversation, where our undeniable physical spark was dampened by his out-of-left-field declaration that he didn't see us ever dating, specifically citing our divergent attitudes toward recreational drug use (well, DUH), but he'd love to be friends. Which is fine by me. Our goodbye lasted a good half hour, too, which was also fine by me.

And now I have the memories of a pretty spectacular first date (all things considered) with none of the concerns about compromising my singlehood before the big Top 20 Singles launch party on June 25. Mark your calendars!