Love and Marriage.

Posted 9:54 AM by sean
Strom Thurmond’s Black Daughter. That’s the headline on Slate.

And I guess if I owe you a rant, I should start by saying that this one might make you uncomfortable. But the cover of Newsweek is talking about gay marriage and everyone is going on and on about Scalia, so I thought I would weigh in on this.

And before I get too far, I feel like I need to say that I understand that the individual is not only more important than the group, the individual to me is all. When I was doing a show at the Black Spectrum Theater, every single guy didn’t eat soul food and talk about black artists and basketball. Only almost every single guy. Anthony, who grew up in LA like me, didn’t really follow sports, didn’t speak in ebonics, etc. But most of the guys did, and culturally, I embraced them and was embraced by them because I also like soul food, black artists and basketball.

That being said, culturally, I have very little in common with gay people. Despite my extended relationships in high school, I now find myself barely tolerating social gay behavior, and I find that the gay community, of which I used to belong, tolerates me not at all. Although several of my best friends are gay, they also don’t fit in to gay society. I do love new nice shoes, I do love cooking and designing a home, and I do love intimacy with other guys on many levels, but I can’t stand replacing wit with flamboyance, I hate that outrageous behavior replaces debate, and I feel that celebrating sexuality is akin to finding meaning in digestion or respiration.

Again, this is not everyone. Standard disclaimers apply.

That being said, I am, of course, completely in favor of gay marriage. If you are stupid enough to want to get married, then get married. What on earth are people protecting with the defense of marriage act? Are you really so scared of your secret gay curiosity that you worry that your marriage will count as a gay marriage if gay people are also allowed to marry? I mean, gay people own cars, you own a car, maybe you’re gay...

And don’t talk to me about the ‘ick factor’ as Newsweek called it. You think about gay guys, and you think about… y’know… ‘back there’… you think about your own ‘back there’ and what comes out of ‘back there’… and, I mean, that’s just… gross… that’s supposed to be where doo doo comes out…

You are an infant. If you don’t like picturing gay people having anal intercourse, let me ‘splain something to you. Gay people don’t have to have anal intercourse, a lot of it is mutual masturbation, which a lot of you straight guys in fraternities do all the time anyway. And secondly, if you think anyone wants to watch you have sexual intercourse, even in missionary position with an attractive man or woman, you are wrong. Look at yourself. Do you really think anyone wants to picture you having sex?

We’ve made it impossible to find sex beautiful on any level. Your face generally looks like you are about to sneeze, and you are hunched around yourself all bowled over and bent double and knees tucked up or legs splayed out. You look ridiculous ‘making the beast with two backs’, so don’t go talking about how gross it is to picture gay sex. All sex is ridiculous, porn has to go to great lengths and hire yoga instructors to make it look good.

Back to Strom. You can say you hate something, you can say you want something removed from your life, but chances are that you don’t want it there because the temptation is too high. You want it yourself, or you wouldn’t care if it was there. If I was watching my weight, I could buy all the ice cream in the world, because, truthfully, I don’t like ice cream that much and I wouldn’t eat it anyway. Strom wanted the black people separated from him, because he couldn’t stop himself from rubbing up against them.

You don’t want gay people around, because you secretly know that you actually want them around.

Fag.

Mrs. Walters, you suck

Posted 1:28 PM by sean
Mrs. Walters, my fourth grade teacher, did not meet my educational needs. I would like to use this space today to call Mrs. Walters out, and to beg the rest of you shitty ass teachers to take a second and try to figure out what is wrong with that kid that you think is just a snotty little fuck.

Was I a snotty little fuck? Sure. I know this because part of me still is. Was I the son of the symphony conductor and as such did I consider myself better than everyone else? No. I didn’t. I simply never did. But should I have been held to a different academic standard? Absolutely yes. I had an unrecognized learning disability that is so clear to the doctors that I went to at age 26, they were shocked that it hadn’t been detected earlier. "What were your teachers thinking," one doctor asked me. "They were thinking about how much they hated me," I answered.

And I guess the latest Harry Potter book really set me off. Not only is Harry’s behavior a close description of what manic phases feel like, but Umbridge is a just and perfect description of what the horrible beaten down bitches who taught me in school were like.

My apologies, I am sure there are some of you beaten down, child hating mongrel-dogs out there that are teaching school and are merely half bad instead of all bad. But there is a myth at work in the American school system. That myth is that people are attracted to careers where they can make no money and have to deal with people who are one tenth as mature as they are, simply for the altruistic bliss of passing on the knowledge of our culture to our children. It’s bullshit.

There are several reasons why people become teachers. Number one is, of course, that they are incapable of doing anything else. There is a saying in the world of the arts that those who can, do, those who can’t, teach. However, I think this alone accounts for a small number of people who end up cornered and backed into teaching.

The prime reason to become a teacher is so you can feel good about your own fucked up life by being around people who don’t know things that you take for granted. Those little forwards they pass around the internet full of hilarious mispronunciations and malopropisms from school age children? What are you laughing at, you asshole? Seriously, what is so fucking funny? Spelling is arbitrary, it's changed a thousand times in the last two hundred years. Was a third grader supposed to know the difference?

It’s all so amusing isn’t it, and you feel a real sense of control, being around people who, through nothing other than their limited time on the planet, know less than you, don't you? Chances are, they are actually smarter than you. I certainly was. I had one idiot after another, every single year, every single class, starting in montessory and ending when I finally dropped out of my fourth college. Not a single teacher knew how to teach me anything, and I am not alone. As a nation we are becoming stupider, and it’s because self help dropouts, unemployed narcisists who would otherwise be in prison, and sadists are teaching our children.

And that is the number one reason why people teach. They love the feel of a menacing threat delivered into the face of a nine year old. They love bending over from the waist and peering down at a smaller human and mentioning ‘detention’ or ‘demerits’ or, as has been the case for years, ‘the paddle’. They want to spread pain, in order to dull the voices screaming out their own mediocrity, they want to hear the cries coming from the children on their laps because they have lost the ability to cry for themselves, they want to inflict discipline on these innocents because they don’t have the discipline themselves to stop watching porn or eating cheese doodles or whatever it is they are doing that makes them hate themselves.

Someone will undoubtably tell me about some noble professor who taught them right from wrong, some fucking oh-captain-my-captain sob story, but I'm willing to bet that teacher taught at a well-funded private school, where dealing with kids is offset by the idea that the curiculum will make the world better, and the pay is worth it.

Never happened in my school. Not to me, and not to anyone I went to school with. Just Mrs. Walters slowly bending my finger back when I pointed at her and told her to leave me alone. Just Mrs. Walters breaking precedent and dropping the pop quiz I got a perfect score on, because I was the only one who was caught up in the reading. Just Mrs. Walters yelling times table numbers at me in front of the class, so sure that I would get one wrong, so furious when I didn't.

All y'all should be ashamed of yourselves.