first kiss

Mama Warning: Rated K for Kissing.

Me, 17, a slow bloomer. A sincere nerd, in a time before the geek inherited the Earth. An out queer, in a time before Ellen. Opportunities seemed thin on the ground. Had-I-known-then-what-I-know-now and so on. Never been kissed.

Jenn, closest friend and bad influence, thank goodness. My age but "worldly." Spent a lot of time in college dorms with older friends, and the rest of her time with me. By then she'd been thrown out by her mom and I somehow convinced my own saintly and remarkable parents to take her in temporarily. More about that another time, huh? Much more importantly to Past Hank, Jenn'd been exiled from home in part for being bisexual, making her one of maybe three women my age even theoretically approachable.

Thankfully, I'm old to have really been online in my teens. All that terrible poetry, gone. You can't even imagine. There's no sexual tension like teenage queer sexual tension.

My folks went to Mexico and left Granny to mind the four of us. (Poor Granny.)

Jenn and I always went to the library downtown, as allowed, and wound up in Old City Cemetery, down the hill, on a grave for a girl named Jenny. Comfortable, semi-hidden, and she felt a name-based kinship to the occupant. We'd been touching each other all day, as accidentally as possible. At school, sitting on the same step in a back stairway with a few other outcasts. Fingers brushing knees in class. Kept my hair shaved down to velvet then, and her hands reached to stroke it when I stood near. In the graveyard, in the October sun, leaned up against a double headstone, shoulder to shoulder. Did I kiss her then? No.

Back to the house. The third floor belonged to teenagers. One long room, like a karate studio, the length of the house. Cut into three with a pair of massive bookshelves and sheets haphazardly strung for privacy. My chunk had no windows and was papered in pictures, few over palm size, cut from magazines. May was somewhere? doing much worse things, I'm sure. She ran with a fast crowd. I was jealous.

Jenn'd done this before, and bless her for it. I was so nervous I had electricity crawling around under my skin. She asked for a backrub. I do give a pretty good backrub. She turned over and kissed me. No rush at all. One hand on the back of my neck, one on my side, on my bare skin. She bit my lip hard enough to make me whine.

We did more than night, but it's fainter and fuzzier and further away.

By the way, tonight's date went well.

a difference that makes no difference

Post-transition, I've become largely gender indiscriminate in dating. Male and female have become a bit of a sliding scale. Moving along that line - line? curve? blur? explosion? - turns out to be remarkably simple. It's the context we place that change in, the medical barriers we put up against it, the official hoops we are required to jump through, the emotional battles we fight within ourselves about it that make the whole thing complicated. And I'm not saying it's easy - you can ask anyone who ever tried to lose weight if simple means easy - I'm just saying that it doesn't matter to me in a dating situation anymore. 

Hell, it's queer no matter who I hook up with these days. 

So, I have a date tonight. I hope I have a clean shirt.

facts

In certain circles, Thursday is known as "the Triviaman's Friday."

Trivia is different every night, but exactly the same. I'm a carnival talker, same basic script daily but with new questions, new jokes fitted into their spots. Same warnings, I do them by rote while feeling out the crowd. I need you to take your cell phone i-phone, i-pad, smart phone, flip phone, whatever it is you use to communicate with other people, and put that in your pocket or your purse, out of sight and off the table. 

I'm completely in love with my own voice these days. This is a post-testosterone affair. I'm good on a microphone and on the rare occasion that I eat shrooms I wind up talking a lot but very calmly just to enjoy what I sound like. I may have a problem with maintaining an inside voice, but that's been a lifelong truth.

I love my job.

delay

Ach. A typo led to one lens of my new glasses being decidedly wrong, so back they went and in another week I'll get my clear vision again. In my twenties, it would have enraged me. With any luck, I'd have left the store before I cussed a blue streak about having to wait. Past Hank loved anger, loved the power that built up behind the rage. But nobody likes Angry Hank much.

I still feel flashes of it, heat lightning, but life is so much easier when you let the little shit roll by. I may have to wait a week, but now I won't feel embarrassed to go back. Save up the gunpowder for the big stuff. Hard won wisdom, and I'm handing it out for free.

too long between visits

There's a woman in North Carolina that I never see. There's a woman in North Carolina that is very busy and owns a house and two dogs and I wish I saw her more often. There's a woman in North Carolina that I have mostly given up on, that I doubt I'll ever give up on completely. There's a woman in North Carolina that's fucked up in just the right ways to make the ways in which I'm fucked up worth it. Come to sunny Florida, North Carolina woman. Sunny Florida misses you.

sight

I'm not blind, but I'm blind enough. I take off my glasses to sleep, to swim, to shower. To make out, because they smear against their nose or click against their glasses. (Hank makes passes at folks who wear glasses.) Sex, obviously, because they'd fall off anyway. I used to leave them with the bartender or a friend when I crashed into a mosh pit, and now I barely recognize myself in old show photos.

When Rick Scott laid us all off, I got a new pair before I lost my benefits. That's gone five years now, and mine have become a mass of scratches. At night, the world is full of flares and rainbows and auras and halos. Headlights blast like explosions. Driving isn't fun and probably not safe.

So I finally got an eye exam and yes, my left eye is worse than it ever was, but also: bifocals. Lord help me. I don't look forward to losing even more of my field of vision. That being said, I'll be able to see again! I pick them up today, on my way to trivia. The world, clear again!

after work, meandering

Johnny's hurt his leg somehow. This happens every so often. He's not an adept climber, and his nails never quite retract - he snags on things. I just fed him a sympathy sardine.

A Monday night, home from work and talking to the cat. "What did you do, boy?" He doesn't meow like a cat, just meeps quietly. A friend once said he sounded like Mike Tyson, so there you go.

I should work on tomorrow's trivia. I have a few ideas, but I'm not sure. I hate slogging through a mediocre round that no one enjoys. I write five rounds a day, four or five days per week. Me, the guy who never did a homework assignment in his life. Now I give daily pop quizzes for fun and profit. Strange ol' world.