Cognitive Dissonance Theater:

A Four-Act Fantasia on Lies, More Lies, Even More Lies and Cripplingly Inconvenient Stupidity

Enjoy!

Sexy level: WOKE

1. How on earth did I manage to cut my forehead taking a shower this morning?
2. Does anyone have a comb I could borrow?
3. Or a weed whacker?
4. I am not a human mustache. STOP. OBJECTIFYING. ME.
5. Should I follow my dreams to become a teen model or be in a boy band?
6. Teen model. I'm probably too cookie-cutter dreamy to be in a boy band and I'd hate to get stuck singing backup with my androgynously non-threatening boy-band clones.
7. If Tom Selleck calls asking who stole his sex appeal, tell him I'm not here.
8. Ditto for Burt Reynolds.
9. By the way, "Cop and a Half" ruined both of our careers. I will never forgive him for that.
10. Seriously: soap + water. What part of that equation caused me to cut my forehead?

"I have never even heard of Donald Trump Jr."

Small blessings

At least it's the sexy Trump brother whose face is all over the news this week.

You will LEARN YOUR GRAMMAR!

My mom grew up in an era where apparently grammar was a blood sport, brutal playground violence was passively dismissed as "having things done to us" teachable moments and multiple pronouns led inevitably to multiple concussions. Naturally, she became an English teacher.

Her childhood "Grammar Can Be Fun" death treatise eventually landed in my impressionable autodidactic orbit, where I couldn't tear my eyes away from dead cockroach-ogres named Ain't and racist caricatures of Chinamen named Ing and inkblotty little spider-people who were doomed page after page to suffer horrifyingly violent deaths at the hands of invisible sharp-shooting hitmen who beaned them into broken, disfigured blots of catastrophic medical trauma using blood-red balls the size of their heads, or what was eventually left of them.

The book filled my young, sponge-like mind simultaneously with nightmarish horror; a lack of inspiration to draw any better than an alcoholic third-grader; and a damn-the-infidels, take-no-prisoners zealotry for parallel verbs, drafty kerning and horribly racist gerunds.

But it made me the man I am today: a needless-punctuation-eschewing, shameless-vocabulary-flaunting, always-silently-judging, endlessly-trump-mocking lapsed grammar columnist and grammatically conscientious tweeter who obsessively re-edits Facebook posts and who can't bring himself to forward even the most brilliant of memes if they contain negligible punctuation errors.

Oh -- and I also write stuff for a living.

It's today

Taco cat
Senile felines
Egad! An adage!
Yawn a more Roman way.
A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!
7/10/17

Current dating strategy

CedaRound: Soaring spirals and grand geometries and crenellated cornices

2nd Avenue between 2nd and 3rd Streets SE

Shhh! Billy Elliot Act II is going on as we speak

But I wanted to show you my totally tubular angled-piping pieced-mesh track jacket. And our totally tall endlessly winding kinda unnerving stage-right staircase. But it's cool, Man. It's cool.

Cedar Rapids PrideFest!

Our humble city's pride celebration is 1,000 mph slower than what I experienced for 15 years in Chicago. And it's totally my speed. One complaint, though: I'm all for the all-families-welcome spirit of inclusion, but it makes husband shopping exponentially more challenging in our city's not-so-populated gay population. Adorable Charlie the dog DID make it way easier to meet women and children, though. So there's that.

OMG

Week II

In just an hour these seats will be filled with friends and strangers from around the community and -- and I know this for a fact tonight -- hundreds of miles and multiple states away, all ready to be taken on a journey of love and self-discovery and deep-rooted dignity and triumph over challenges both personal and universal. And this stage will be overflowing with the music and the energy and the characters who will lead the way: loving parents and maturing children and workers struggling to survive and people discovering the beauties and truths of art and oddballs (and their mustaches!) who are there purely for comic relief and quiet friendships and mighty tribes and devastating sorrows and euphoric shared joys.

We open our second of four weekends tonight. Come experience the adventure with us at Theatre Cedar Rapids

Trolling cretins is no fun when they don't even notice you

Flashback Friday: Saucy Ankle Edition

The 2008 Atlantis Freedom Cruise -- a gay cruise where we were all held hostage in a zero-carb, all-Speedo environment for a week on a ship ironically named Freedom of the Seas -- included the opportunity to fake surf and for-real wipe out no matter how hard you hold on in front of a line of impatient guys who really want you to wipe out soon so they get a chance to try it. I remember this FlowRider -- yes, that's the name -- experience to be both totally fun and totally not worth it, given the wait-in-line-time-vs-the-time-it-takes-to-wipe-out ratio.

But I sure did have a saucy ankle back then.

Oh, I'm gonna get mail for this

How to unleash a Twitter shitstorm

A dumb bar walks into a Poland

Is he done blathering to Poland about how Polish Americans helped him win an election nine months ago? Because I want to venture out into the adult world and rock my booshy moostache and El Camino T-shirt.

Are you a good witch? Or a sandwich?

It's hot and it's monotonous

Important things to know about me

1. My mom selfishly had shoulder surgery so I'm forced to fold my own laundry
2. I have an El Camino T-shirt and you suck
3. I mean you don't
4. I own underpants in a rich spectrum of blacks and blues
5. Yes, I do own a concentric tie-dyed Captain America T-shirt
6. My smiley-face shirt says "have a nice day" on the front and the back
7. Because I'm so emotionally magnanimous that I want you to be happy whether you see me coming or going
8. Yes, that is a bleach print of a mouse under a mushroom right above the chest pocket on that black T-shirt
9. Because why not?
10. El. Camino. T. Shirt.