We Who Are About To Die Salute You

I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but maybe it's time to update my will. I'm in relatively good health and all that, but better men than I have been undone by what I'm facing over the next thirty or so hours.

I hesitate to bring it up because I don't want to scare anyone. Besides, I know that people find their way here from all over the world, so if you're having a meal, don't say I didn't warn you. Anyway: both tonight and tomorrow night, I will be ... attending the opera.


If you've stopped screaming (or, for those of you with weaker constitutions, you've revived from your fainting spell), then I'll elaborate. Tonight, I'm either seeing Carmen or Lucrezia Borgia, and then tomorrow night, I'm seeing whichever one I'm not seeing tonight.

I'm sure I could figure out which I'm seeing tonight, but, really, why bother? They'll give me a program when I get there. And if I somehow don't get one, it's pretty simple: if I recognize the overture, it's Carmen. I know the music from Carmen pretty well. As for LB, well, I believe that it was written by an Italian, and I'm almost certain that people die. The same could be said about at least half of the operas in the standard repertory, I suppose, but why mess with a formula that works, right?


Actually, I've never seen a live performance of Carmen, so that'll be cool. Unfortunately, I won't be seeing Denyce Graves in the title role. Apparently the way it works is that with a subscription series, you either get to see Ms. Graves in Carmen or Renee Fleming as Ms. Borgia. We saw Ms. Graves a couple of years ago. She was one of the few bright spots in a rather disappointing production of Il Trovatore. I've never seen Ms. Fleming, though, and I've wanted to, so here's my chance. I considered getting b&c tickets, as a Christmas present, to one of her performances of Thais at the Met, but it didn't work out, so I had to come up with another way to spend that five hundred bucks. I don't really mean to suggest that if all the world's opera goers redirected what they would have spent on opera tickets we could end world hunger, but, well, maybe I do mean that.


Anyway, I understand from the reviews that Ms. Fleming may be out of range in Lucrezia Borgia. That is, if b&c's reporting of the reviews is correct: I can't be bothered to read the reviews when I know that he'll summarize them for me. This leads to exchanges like the following:

B&c: It says here that Renee Fleming is out of range in Lucrezia Borgia.
TED: Quelle dommage. Or its Italian equivalent, I suppose.
B&c: But they give her credit for trying such a demanding role.
TED: Hmmph. Maybe, but after seeing Electra, any other role seems like a walk in the park. Honestly, what's with the sopranos. What a bunch of prima donnas. Oh, wait.
B&c: And they say that Lucrezia Borgia isn't a very sympathetic character.
TED: [stares]
B&c: What?
TED: Dude.
B&c: What?
TED: It's Lucrezia fucking Borgia. She's not Show White.
B&c: Historically, there's not much evidence that she was really all that bad.
TED: Historically, Snow White's stepmother was a real peach, but that's not how she's generally portrayed in artistic renderings.
B&c: Can we get back to opera?
TED: Certainly. I know that Bashful is a trouser role, but I forget about Grumpy. Is he a bass baritone?

Anyway, there's always a silver lining. On Sunday afternoon, b&c, who had just returned from a trip to Baltimore where he learned that the symphony wasn't playing that afternoon and that his ticket had actually been for the night before, told me that the National Opera had decided to postpone its production of the Ring Cycle because they couldn't afford the exorbitant cost of producing it. B&c is devastated, but, fortunately, in just a few days he's off to spend a couple of weeks doing some consulting in Algiers, where I'm sure he'll find immense comfort in the arms and beneath the bodies of many attractive young Arab men. The damnation of the gods will just have to wait for a few years.

There may even be a second silver lining. I think one of the reviews for one of the operas said something about a tenor who looked good in leather pants. Tenors, of course, are notoriously poorly hung, but when I see a guy in leather pants, I'm mostly looking for a nice ass, so maybe I'll get lucky.

A Short Primer on IRC §707(b)

Last Thursday I was in a seminar in DC, and at lunch at the hotel (chicken; it's always chicken) I happened to mention to the five or six of my bosses and co-workers at the same table that it might actually be worth buying a Kindle if I could get the Internal Revenue Code on it. A couple of my fellow diners tried to move farther away from me, but most of them just gave me an indulgent he-may-be-a-geek-but-he's-our-geek smile. I get that look a lot. The only person who thought I was joking was the boss that I work most closely with. As it happens I was joking, but only because I knew that they almost certainly wouldn't have gotten around to making a Kindle-friendly version of the Internal Revenue Code. If such a thing were to exist, it would be the coolest thing ever, and I'm pretty sure my boss (whose geekiness rivals my own) would have the firm buy one for me.


It occurred to me that, perhaps because I spend so much time writing about mansex (mmmmmmm, mansex), I rarely talk about the pleasures or indicia of geekiness. I'm sure there are plenty of geeks who are not at all sexy, but I routinely lust after the clueless and skinny young men who walk around with vacant expressions because their minds are too occupied by whatever it is they're thinking about to notice that they're a few seconds away from running into someone in the hallway. Especially if they've taken the trouble to acquire a nice pair of eyeglasses and to wear a clean button-down shirt. I wanted to populate today's post with pictures of hot geeks, but I was unable to locate any nudes of Nate Silver. But at least these guys have nice asses.


I'm not always the world's most successful geek, but Cthulhu knows that I try. Well, okay, I've never really been able to get into H.P. Lovecraft, but I did read an awful lot of science fiction in my youth. I would probably get back into it now, but only if I could find pornographic gay science fiction. Which, now I think of it, either must exist or is a niche screaming to be filled. If you've read any, drop me an email and let me know the titles. Otherwise, I'm likely to spend most of the day fantasizing about zero-gravity ass fucking. It's hard to imagine how that wouldn't be a good time.


By the way, topping the list of other geek-related areas in which I could use some serious advice and/or help is Nethack. I've been playing, off and on, for years, but I've never managed to ascend. Right now, I've got a twenty-third-level Valkyrie most of the way to the bottom of Gehennom, and I still have one charge left on my wand of wishing, but I'm probably going to have to use that for some fireproof speed boots. But there's still a long way to go to win, and this is the farthest I've ever gotten. Finding a scroll of genocide early was key. It's just a shame that I don't have a functioning magic marker right now, but since I've already wiped out liches, eels, and green slimes, I might be okay. My main strategic adjustment this time was to stop playing at midnight. One little fatigue-related error in judgment and suddenly you've been turned to stone or drowned. The dungeon is a cruel place.


I suppose that any readers who were paying attention to the words as well as the pictures could have inferred my level of geekiness from prior rants about grammar and usage. B&c got annoyed with me after dinner the other night when he said that something was an acronym and I told him that it was really just an abbreviation. Even though I was unquestionably in the right. B&c is an intellectual, but he doesn't really have geek tendencies. I mean, he's intelligent, and he's got the clueless part down, but while there may be some sort of moral-aesthetic equivalence between geeks and opera enthusiasts, we're really different animals. But at least he's got a nice ass.

Clean

I was following a very cute guy into the supermarket yesterday. He was about forty and short with a buzz cut, a very perky ass, and a wedding ring: just my type! But then, just as the automatic doors opened, he grabbed one of those sanitizing wipes that now appear ubiquitously at local supermarket entrances and wiped down the handle of his shopping cart. I couldn't help rolling my eyes and finding him slightly less attractive. I still kept an eye on him because, really, it was a notably perky ass of just the sort that cries out for attention from my tongue and cock.


Anyway, my point here is not that I spend a lot of time staring at attractive guys in the supermarket. I mean, I do, but I do so discreetly, and I'm always aware that while there are many, many married guys who love nothing more than to have their asses eaten and then fucked, there are many more married guys who, all of our fantasies and their perky asses notwithstanding, really just aren't into guys. I'm more concerned with the ubiquity of sanitizing wipes and other products of their ilk.


I'm not entirely unconcerned with our microbial adversaries. I use condoms, and I avoid kissing men who have colds. (I'm aware that kissing isn't mainly how the colds are spread, but in this case, "kissing" is a euphemism for all the more effective sexual vectors of rhinoviral transmission. You all know how I abhor frank discussions of sexual activities.) But I don't use the hand sanitizer at the gas station. (By the way, am I supposed to use that before or after I pump gas? Both, perhaps?) It's hard for me to imagine that a gas pump is a particularly hospitable environment for disease-causing microbes. For that matter, it's hard to believe that a shopping cart handle is likely to make you ill. Surely, my perky-assed married friend is more likely to come into contact with harmful bacteria on the surface of that cucumber that he's so lovingly stroking (This detail may be one that I've made up, but he did spend a lot of time in the produce section. I had to pretend to be interested in some kiwis just to get close enough to see the wedding ring: the fantasy's not as good if they're single.) than on the cold metal-and-plastic handle of his shopping cart.


And I appreciate cleanliness, to a point. I'm routinely disgusted by the state of public toilets, and if a guy's been out working in the mud, I'll throw him in the shower before I'll have my way with him. Mud-covered man is visually hot, but, well, eww. In fact, recently out of the shower is one of my favorite ways to enjoy a man. Better still is if he's gotten out of the shower, thrown on some jeans, and sat for half an hour or so reading (preferably porn, so he'll be all worked up). That's just enough time for a guy to start smelling like a man without starting to smell like a dirty man. There's nothing like tossing a clean man on the bed and working on his nipples for a half hour or so before peeling off his jeans and shoving my tongue into his ass. Especially if he's a short married guy with short hair and a perky ass. Who doesn't use sanitizing wipes.

Men at Work

I haven't been near a computer much over the past couple of days. In fact, right now, I'm meant to be sitting at a table, with a large cup of coffee and perhaps a Danish pastry or a sub-par bagel, and listening to a couple of lawyers take turns talking about some of the current developments in the more arcane areas of pass-through entity taxation. But I'm not doing that because yesterday, after a very long and very boring day of doing that exact same thing, I and two of my bosses had to hurry back to the office to have an evening meeting with some clients who could not wait until Monday to discuss their own developments, which also happened to be occurring in some of the more arcane areas of pass-through taxation. After the meeting, my bosses and I discussed the tax issues, then I did some more research, and then it was too late to go to choir practice, so I went home. I self-medicated (Benadryl: am I wicked or what?) and was asleep before 10.


I believe, and my boss believes, that I've resolved the technical issues for this particular problem, but according to the clients, there exists in their lawyer's office a 110-page, single-spaced memo about a particular issue, and we don't want to give the client the final answer until I've had a chance to review that memo. So while I should be downtown trying to stay awake, I'm at the office, hoping that the lawyer got my boss' voicemail and emails the memo to me early enough in the day so that I can still make it downtown in time for lunch and to sleep through the afternoon session.


I can't truly claim to love my job or even like it very much. I can say that I don't dislike it and that it is not infrequently interesting and intellectually stimulating. I can also say that I work for and with good people who value my contributions and who mostly don't require me to assume the sort of odious managerial duties that are typically required of someone at my level. And, really, it doesn't much matter to me whether I'm sitting in my office waiting for an email or sitting at a seminar table trying not to stay awake at least a few moments longer than my boss.


It is depressingly common for white-collar workers (What a phrase: I can't remember the last time I wore a white-collared shirt to work. It's business casual around here, except that during tax season and the summer, Fridays are jeans days.) to whinge about how difficult their jobs are. Oh, the work! Oh, the hours! Dude. Sitting at a desk and reading, typing, and answering the occasional phone call are not hard work. Attending frequent meetings (which I really don't have to do because I'm relatively smart and very lucky) is unpleasant, but it's not hard work, either. I'm sure there are exceptions, but for the most part in our society, the people who work the hardest are the people who earn the least. So, yeah, I missed choir practice last night, but I'm pretty sure that I didn't work nearly as hard as the people who served us our lunch yesterday.


Anyway, my memo has arrived, and it pretty much confirms what I already knew, so I'm going to print it out, highlight a few passages, and head downtown. Enjoy these pictures of men who are doing a particular kind of job that they appear to love.

Yes We Can

Well, that's a relief, isn't it? Not only can we stop getting into stupid wars for the wrong reasons and stop distributing wealth upwards and stop torturing prisoners and stop the assault on the separation of powers, we can look forward to a day when every man, woman, and child in this great country will know better than to say "nucular."


I have to admit that I got a little bit choked up when I was casting my ballot this morning. I waited in line roughly seventy-five minutes for the opportunity to touch the screen, and it was definitely worth it. Voting gave me a great feeling of calm that lasted until at least mid-afternoon. Then I was pretty nervous until the networks called Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then I was fine again.


Anyway, I don't have anything else to say about the election. I'm happy with the result, but the only thing I did was vote. I reckon that people who volunteered and worked hard for their candidate have more cause to celebrate, and good for them.


I do want to point out, however, that now that we can hope to bring many or perhaps most of our soldiers from foreign wars, they'll need something else to do. Maybe these pictures will provide some useful ideas.


Hey, a guy can dream, right?

Vote!

If there's any justice in the world (a dubious proposition, I admit), then about this time tomorrow I'll be congratulating myself for having done my bit to help move my country in a better direction. (I prefer not to dwell on the alternative: screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" while trying to determine whether I qualify to emigrate to one of the Balkan states.) I live in one of the bluest of all states; in fact, most pollsters don't bother with Maryland because, well, what are the odds? So I could abstain on the grounds that Senator Obama doesn't really need my vote, and maybe that's true, but he's going to get it whether he needs it or not.


It's not just that voting is a duty for everyone who is fortunate enough to live in a democratic society (though it is), and it's not just that if you don't vote, you really have no right to complain about the monstrous way your government sometimes behaves (though you don't). And it's not that any of the previous elections were unimportant: in the past, I've felt that I had to vote even when I could take it for granted that my guy was going to lose (Mondale in 1984, Dukakis in 1988) or win (Clinton in 1996). Important as those elections were, though, this one is more so.


In terms of important matters of governance and our understanding of the constitution, this election promises to be the most important election of my voting career (so far). It's clear that America's been led off in disastrous directions for the past eight years, and it's equally clear that Senator McCain would double down on those bad decisions. He'll call it something else, but, well, lipstick on a pig, and all that, you know?


But there's more to it than that. As important as putting America back on a better path is, I think it's an open question whether it's even possible to fix the damage of the Dubya years. It seems entirely possible to me that our international reputation and financial bases have been damaged beyond the point of repair. Which is not to say that, if the ship is going down, it would be better to torpedo it straight away than to try to keep it afloat for long enough to get everyone into the lifeboats.


But as important as having the right person to lead the country is, the political considerations seem to me almost as important as considerations of governance. Senator McCain has run the ugliest in memory. He has as much as acknowledged that he has nothing to offer except for not being the other guy, or, to put it more plainly, John McCain's campaign boils down to "If you're not voting for me, you're voting for the n_____." If McCain wins tomorrow night, it won't be a vote for smaller government: it'll be a vote for racism and swift boating.


I'm not saying that a vote for Obama is a vote for all that's good and holy, but I am saying that if Obama wins, in addition to a chance to set the country right, there's a chance that the future of political discourse will be permanently changed for the better. There's a chance that the model for future elections will be gaining support (financial and otherwise) from a large base of the populace and for leading people by hope rather than fear. I'll be honest: Senator Obama wasn't my first choice. I always thought he was a good man and a good candidate, but I initially thought that hope was far too simple a message for someone who wants to lead our country in especially trying times. But Senator McCain has convinced me that I was wrong. It really is as simple as that: you can vote for hope, or you can vote for fear. I recognize that some people would substitute entirely different nouns in that last clause, but even if you feel that way, you must still recognize that tomorrow's election will be transformative. And you still have to vote.

Covariate Analysis in the Early Works of Hemingway

I wondered, briefly, Friday evening whether I might be in a horror movie. I had spent an ungodly amount of time in one of the local supermarkets in an unsuccessful search for fresh apple cider, and then I appeared to be trapped in the express lane line, which did not move at all for quite some time. The man in front of me was wearing dirty green work pants and a dull orange knit shirt which perfectly matched the color of his skin. My first thought was that he didn't look well. Then I thought, "Interesting costume, dude," but I returned to the notion that he was unwell when he attempted to cough up a lung. There was a definite moment of surreality, which felt exactly like the moment in a horror movie just before everyone turns into zombies and begins wanting to eat your brain. But that didn't happen, and I managed to escape the Safeway with my life and my brain more or less intact, though I did have to settle for clear cider with an unnaturally long shelf life.


I had left the office early, so I did manage to make it home and light the candles in the jack-o-lanterns before the fall of darkness and the arrival of costumed children. One of the first groups to arrive at my doorstep and demand candy as a form of protection money was comprised largely of under-fives and their parents. I was passing out the candy when one child, who cannot have been more than two, apparently saw something in the house that he liked and walked right in. This disturbed his mother, but when one of the other mothers said, "You better go after him," she replied that she didn't want "to just walk into his house" and proceeded to stand in my doorway and shake a bag of candy at her son, who soon decided that there was nothing in the house as interesting as the combination of his candy and his mother. He was wearing a giraffe costume and was cuter than one would have thought it possible for even a two-year-old to be, so when his mother apologized for his having walked into the house, there was nothing to be done but shrug and give him an extra piece of candy. I'm pretty sure that if one of my children had wandered into someone else's house back when she was two, I'd have excused myself and gone in after her, but the occasion never arose, so I can't say for certain.


The trick-or-treaters were mostly finished by 8, though at 8:30, when the candles in the jack-o-lanterns had burned themselves out, a group of teenagers came by. I had not turned out the front porch light because I was expecting Logan. I took a quick but nervous shower in the downstairs bathroom, wondering all the time how speedily I could get dress if someone showed up at the door, but fortunately, the next time the doorbell rang, it was after 9:30, and it was Logan. He'd emailed me earlier in the day, and he'd implied that it would be nice to sit and chat for a while before I took him upstairs and pounded him, so we did that, and it was very nice, and then I took him upstairs, and we watched some gay short films while we got started, and then we took things very slowly, so that we were maybe ninety minutes in before I started to penetrate him. And that was probably just as well because I bent him into the angle where I could most effectively hit his prostate, and he began to cum fairly quickly. But he's the sort of bottom who continues to enjoy being hammered even after he's lost a load, so I power fucked him for the next hour (with some short breaks, of course: I'm not twenty-five, after all), and then I came. And then we spent the rest of the night alternating between cuddling, making out, sleeping, and fucking. He left around 11 the next morning, after which I ate leftover Halloween candy until I was thoroughly sick. It's only once a year, right?


B&c was due back from Managua in the evening, so even though it was the nicest early November day in memory, I mostly stayed in and cleaned the house some. I heard from my down-the-street buddy Christopher in the middle of the afternoon. He wanted to catch a movie last night, and his suggestion was that we either travel into DC to catch Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild or go to one of the local theaters and see W. I was going to beg off, but then I realized that b&c would likely be exhausted from his flight back and would just come home and go to sleep. I further realized that even though we'd be out pretty late, I'd have an extra hour, so after verifying with b&c that he had, in fact, been up since 3 am, I told Christopher that I was game. I simply could not stomach seeing W so close to the election. I didn't know anything at all about AGS:GGW, but Christopher said there'd be lots of flesh, and I sometimes enjoy trashy movies with lots of flesh, so I thought, "Well, how bad can it be?" I figured for once I could abandon my policy of seeing a movie without reading at least one review or checking the tomatometer.

Oh, readers: do not. I can't bring myself to say any more about it. Do. Not.


Having set the clocks back at 2 am, I got up at 8 this morning to go to church and sing with the choir. It was the pre-election day sermon, wherein the minister makes it clear, without mentioning any of the candidates by name and without giving anything that could be construed as an endorsement, that we're all voting for the Democrat. In some years, that probably isn't universally true, but the church has 365 members, and if you figure that's one for each day of the year, I would be shocked if Senator McCain got beyond January 2. The sermon was very rousing, and we were singing "Freedom Come" and a very interesting and stirring arrangement of the national anthem, and it was very, very difficult not to feel hopeful about Tuesday. I did my very best to beat it down, though. If I get all hopeful, and the election goes the wrong way, then I might have to become a secessionist, and that might be difficult. If you promise not to tell anyone, though, I'll admit that I'm optimistic about the election.


After church, I met up with b&c and my friend George in Rockville for brunch. The place we'd originally chosen wasn't open yet, so we went to Gordon Biersch, where b&c and I each had one of their beer samplers. You get four ounces each of the six beers that they make on the premises, all for less than $6. I also had a burger. Five of the six beers were very good. The Czech Lager was the exception, but I tried to view it as an educational experience. One sip of that beer, and you can taste exactly how it feels to have your hopes for democracy crushed by a Soviet occupation. I made it through about half of my four ounces before I felt entirely overcome by the weight of history, and then I gave the remainder to b&c, who is better able to take the long view.