Right, then. There's that out of the way. Small talk was never my forte and I don't really do a good job of moving it along, and anyway the reason I'm publishing something for the first time in over a year is hardly because I have very strong feelings about the crap that Hollywood produces because I'll always have Turner Classic Movies to turn to so I can cleanse my palette and watch something completely drained of color and filled with actual actors actually acting.

No, what I've come here today to discuss is the state of the U.S. in terms of the changing attitudes concerning "the homosexual lifestyle" and my disgust, annoyance, frustration and anger about it all. Because "things are getting better," for sure, but the environment of tolerance and the open dialogs about the rights of individuals to be who they are and enjoy the same rights under the law as others do has also opened up this fresh can of ugly worms - and the fall-out resulting from the can opening and my own reactions and digestion of the resulting tide of scorn and derision and open prejudice that it has taken me until now to finally understand.

Using the word fag, however, has a very distinct goal for its user. They are likely aware that it has the worst connotation to those of us of a certain age, and is colored with all sorts of horror and fear and pain. There are so many other terms for a homosexual person that they could use, and maybe they're too lazy to look them up or think of new ones, so fag is simply the quickest and easiest of those words to hurl. But I think they know what they're doing, and I think they intend to inflict the most pain with the least energy possible.

I can't explain why that word, in particular, has that power, and I suppose it's up to every individual to decide how they feel about it and what their reaction is going to be. I choose usually to ignore it, which is just my way of avoiding further conflict and subjecting myself to someone else's ignorance and probably abstract hatred for someone they don't even know, but choose to define in the narrowest possible manner. Ignoring it doesn't lessen the hurt, nor does it "teach any lessons" to anyone about why they shouldn't use it. I seriously doubt that anything I said would cause the least amount of thought on their part, anyway, and I assume they have some personal reason for hurling insults that has nothing to do with me, anyway. Maybe a homosexual stole their job. Maybe a homosexual has a nicer car. Maybe a homosexual married their...

Oh. Oops. That's where the line can be drawn. Because the chances of that being true are slim, indeed.

What bothers me about the airing of opinions about whether or not homosexual people are worthy of the same rights as non-homosexual people is that those opposed to homosexuals marrying each other are usually also opposed to homosexuals. And the discussion has allowed all those people who might normally be even a little bit ashamed of their hatred to have free reign to spew invective everywhere they want to under the sham of "the redefinition of marriage."

To be clear, what I'm saying is that where before I only suspected that a lot of people hate me, I am now sure of it because I can watch them calmly discuss their opinion that gay people should have limited rights and, in some cases, have their rights stripped from them, and that being gay is, among other things, a psychological problem or even something akin to bestiality and child rape.

So, there's that.

To put this in perspective for those of you who are not gay, imagine that you've prepared yourself a lovely meal after a day's work, settled into the couch, turned on the telly and have the fork poised with a bite of your favorite comfort food (mac 'n' cheese?) as you warm up the TiVo to catch up on the day's events, and you watch someone on CNN (or MSNBC, or Fox News or take your pick of some mainstream news channel or program) and you're suddenly watching two people in conservative clothing debating your right to, oh, let's say, get married. The moderator wants to turn up the heat a bit and tried to prod his or her guests and tries to extend the idea to what other things you should be denied because you like mac 'n' cheese.

Let me also add here that I'm using a fairly innocuous metaphor for homosexuality in deference to those who believe it is a choice rather than something you are born with. You choose to eat mac 'n' cheese, you see. It's not like having blue eyes or being tall or finding the opposite sex attractive, which are obviously innate. After all, I assume you did not choose to find the opposite sex attractive, did you? "Preferring" women in bed over men (or vice versa) isn't like "preferring" mac 'n' cheese over mashed potatoes. It's not something you could just shrug off when the waitress says, "we're all out of macaroni tonight, how about mashed potatoes instead?"

"We're all out of women tonight. How about a man, instead?"

Anyhoo, so, there you are with a fork of steamy, creamy, cheesy mac all ready to go into your salivating gob when you watch someone on The CBS Evening News calmly tell you that you're not entitled to get married because you like macaroni and cheese. Clearly, you are a substandard individual and the law should reflect that.

Now that there's this open debate, you discover that it's everywhere. Everyone has an opinion. To you, it's a bit absurd that anyone would actually question your rights based on your "preference," but whatever. In the back of your mind, you always kind of knew that people didn't approve of you, but at the same time they had always either kept it sort of quiet.

But now, there it is on the evening news. And there it is on CNN.com, and you read stories because it's involves you personally in a way that most things do not (like, gosh, you feel sorry for the Haitians but you don't actually live there. you can imagine what it's like, but you don't really know - but here's a thing where you do really know, and it's not as immediate, horrific and dreadful as living in a nightmare of collapsed buildings and death everywhere, but the "everywhere" portion is expanded to really mean "everywhere" and in this case you don't have to imagine what it's like at all because it's happening to you).

I don't mean to compare the same-sex marriage debates to the earthquake in Haiti, I only use that as an extreme example of watching something on the news and feeling bad, versus watching something on the news which is about you, personally, and the difference in the level of involvement and emotion you're going to experience.

This has been going on for a while and, really, I should be used to it. Now our President is making good on a campaign promise to end the policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the U.S. military and the voices are raised again, even louder than before, and it's the same rhetoric for different reasons.

I am wrong. I have a problem. There is something about me that should be changed, and if it can't be changed, I should be punished somehow. Like blocking shipping to Cuba or denying food to Iran or making the North Koreans suffer. The laws must be defined in such a way that I am a special class of person, in all the specially wrong ways, to make it clear that I am bad, or a bad influence, or something like that. And that the mere acceptance and inclusion of that specialness will ruin it all for everyone else.

This is my take on things. This is my P.O.V., as it were. The view from here.

What was hidden prejudice is now open prejudice. What was shameful hatred is now proud and justified hatred. People are banding together and raising their voices in public forums because many of the things homosexuals were formerly denied because they were homosexuals may no longer be denied to them, and gosh darn it, that's too much!

By this point, I realize I'm beating a dead horse and I assume that if you're here and reading this and still among my small coterie of fans that I don't need to preach this at you, anyway. So my apologies for that, and feel free to go about your business and feel comforted that this isn't happening to you. They're not talking about you. You're safe. You have what I don't, and the chances that someone is going to come along and gather hundreds of thousands of signatures on a petition to strip you of anything is unlikely to happen.

Baby steps, as they say. We're going in the right direction, for sure. I think it will happen, the Prop. 8 mess and the Don't Ask debacle and so forth, I think those will turn out all right for "the gays."

We just need to slog through the mud to get there.

I've been able to stop pretending to heterosexual desires over the last few years. When I'm not in San Francisco or among friends, I still have to remind myself that even looking too closely at a man I might find attractive could result in physical harm, though the chances of that actually happening are very much diminished now that I favor travel to major cities rather than rural townships where cosmopolitan (modern) thinking isn't widely practiced. I'm not about to start prancing around in heels and a wig and screaming for equal rights, and not because I think there's anything wrong with that but because heels are extremely uncomfortable and I have no need of a wig -- frankly, I have too much hair as it is.

But the other part of my life that sometimes requires disguising, the part where I try to "fit in" with Christians, mostly, but also the occasional Jew or Muslim or Hindu -- though I must admit that the latter mingling usually only involves eating regional foods rather than finding myself at prayer with them -- the part where I bow my head in prayer and all that? I'm done with it. I'm done pretending. I'm out of the closet.

I am openly atheist.

Now, I frequently read or hear things like the following, which was left as a comment regarding the above referenced Kentucky Godlike homeland article, copied here without permission or correction:

As a Christian I'm very offended by the atheists attempt to tear God from the fabric of American society, by their condescending remarks and implications that anyone who believes in God is intelligently inferior to them, and I'm especially offended by the way they talk about the Lord God that I love and worship...I've never understood why those who don't even believe there is a God are so uptight about the mention of one. Why don't they just laugh, (to themselves), and shake their heads at the millions of "fools" who believe in God and go on. Since they equate God with Santa, the Easter Bunny, cartoon heroes, and other imaginery characters they must be very busy making objections all the time in many different arenas. Atheists don't get that those of us who are committed to our faith and/or religion can't compartmentalize when and where we'll live, walk and talk what we believe. They do however understand their unwavering commitment to their cause which they live, walk and talk wherever they go. They want me to lay off of my stand for what I believe but, if they really want equality they will have to do the same.

First of all, Santa is imaginary? I'm shocked and a little saddened about that. The Easter Bunny is of course imaginary. Bunnies don't lay eggs! It's an Easter Chicken! God, however, is totally fake. A man in the sky looking down on the Earth and judging everything we do? I think you're confusing God with the TV traffic helicopter.

Sorry. I was laughing (to myself) and got carried away.

As it is so often pointed out to me, Atheists, lacking any moral compass whatsoever with which to navigate life's little trials, have no right to judge or make fun of any other religion. Which is absolutely wrong, of course. We have every right to judge or make fun of anything we damn well please, as does anyone else regardless of their religious orientation.

Rather, what would please us most would be if everyone could all go shut up about whatever it is they believe in and go practice it in their homes and houses of worship.

And leave it there.

Just as you may believe we are openly mocking you and feeling intellectually superior, we believe you are openly ignoring us and feeling morally superior. In truth, neither is actually the case. A belief system or religion has almost nothing to do with intelligence. The belief or non-belief in a god or gods is simply an opinion. There is no proof one way or the other. Can you prove there is a God? Can I disprove it? Does lack of proof mean the absence of a god in the way things work?

My answer to all of those questions is No. But I believe that there is no god above us. Jesus was not a supernatural being. He did not come back to life after crucification. Belief in him is not a requirement to get into heaven, because there is no heaven or hell. No angels. Nothing after death but death. Born from nothing, die back to nothing.

My atheism does not mean that I have no moral compass. I simply don't need a book to tell me how to live my life. I agree with many of its precepts, but I do not believe in its essential ones regarding unquestioning faith in an unseen supernatural being and His control over all things, blind obedience to a church, or anything that requires me to simply accept things without proof of their reality. In short, I have no faith.

Like explaining homosexuality to a homophobe, explaining atheism to a Christian is a nearly impossible task. Believe me, I've tried. I actually enjoy discussions about religion and faith and belief, because most of my friends understand that religion (unlike sexuality) is a choice. No one is born Christian. You may be raised Christian, or become Christian, or accept Christianity. Jews, I believe, accept that they are born Jewish, as long as their mother was Jewish, too. However, you may also convert to Judaism. You can't convert to homosexuality, though some believe (wrongly) that you can convert to heterosexuality, but that's really called "lying to yourself."

But comparing religion and sexuality is bound to end wrongly, so let me bring this all back to my central point and simply state that if you see me at a wedding or a graduation or a commencement ceremony and someone asks me to bow my head for a prayer and I resolutely do not, you'll know why. I'm not intending to protest anything. I'm not being stubbornly obstinate. I'm not making fun of anything, and I'm not behaving in an inappropriate manner.

I am simply refusing to lie anymore. Pray for me.

Not that it'll matter in the least.

I often hear that "we live in a democracy!" and that "the majority rules!" and that "in our democratic form of government, it's one person - one vote!" These are phrases used in arguments to assail those that may be in the minority, or who think that in the United States, laws are always passed by the popular vote and depend on getting a majority, however slim, and that's that. End game. No more discussion.

Friends, we do not live in a democracy and we have never lived in a democracy. The United States is a democratic republic. We rarely do anything based on one person - one vote, which would be true in a democracy. In that case, we would have no need for a congress, or a state assembly, or a town council, or a house of representatives because everything would require a vote of the people to pass.

In a democratic republic, we elect officials to speak for us. We have a representative democracy. We elect the people we believe will best represent our interests or opinions and send them to these other voting bodies and they make the laws for us. We elect the judges who interpret the constitution of our state or country, or we elect the person who appoints those judges. We don't vote on what is constitutional. We elect other people -- who are hopefully better educated and more familiar with those documents -- to make those judgements.

A republic is any government that is not lead by a hereditary monarch or dictator or Pope, for example. A republic is a government (like ours) in which the people, or a part of the people, have a say in the government. Things are not decided by fiat, they are put to a vote, even if that vote is not by the general population but by their elected representatives.

So whenever someone's argument comes down to "it was elected on by popular vote because we live in a democracy!" you are allowed to roll your eyes and smirk and feel slightly superior because you know the truth. This is also why the president is not elected by popular vote, but by the electoral college. You're not voting for the president, you're voting for someone who will vote for the president you told them to. The electors are technically free to vote for anyone they want to, so this is why Barack Obama will not actually be voted in as President Elect until December 15th, when the electors meet to cast their votes on our behalf for the next president of the United States, which will presumably be Barack Obama.

We do not live in a democracy. We live in a representative democracy. We live in a democratic republic.

Even though, only weeks before election day, defeat of the anti-gay marriage was as much as 19 points ahead in some polls, by the day of the election the decision was neck-and-neck, and even though California is often depicted as some insane liberal haven filled with wackos, deviants and drug abusers, that really only applies to us here in San Francisco, and more particularly Berkeley. The Yes on 8 bandwagon was bound to gain steam and roll over those of us who were hoping that maybe this time logic would prevail over fear and prejudice, though I, personally, had faith in the tendency of the electorate to say one thing to pollsters, but vote differently once they were in the privacy of the ballot box.

You might tell a stranger who wants to publish your opinion that you're in favor of freedom and justice for all, but when you're all alone and it's time to stamp the ballot, it's easy to just be yourself. And my faith in the darker nature of us all has not been diminished.

Not long after it became clear that Prop. 8 was going to pass, opponents representing my rights took their case to court in an attempt to overturn and throw out the vote. Frankly, I'm against that tactic. For one thing, they only did that after the vote didn't go our way. If it really was an illegal proposition, why didn't they do something like that before the vote? Was it because everyone thought it would be defeated? I also think that, as much as I hate to admit it, the proponents have a point. This has been voted on twice now, and each time the majority spoke. If we're going to get our rights, I'd prefer to do it in an environment where we're not constantly under legal threat to have them removed all over again. Not that defeat of Prop. 8 necessarily meant that they wouldn't get another million signatures in two year's time and try it again, but if the population of California had voted against it this time, perhaps another proposition would have been harder to come by.

Maybe California, and certainly the rest of the nation (with the exception of Massachusetts) isn't ready to provide equal rights to every citizen. Apparently, the idea of marriage is chockablock with too many minefields. This particular legal contract, it's too darned... oh what's the word? Sacred! Too darned sacred to too much of the population to allow anyone other than "one man and one woman" to be married, and that definition is, according to public comments I read at CNN and elsewhere, thousands of years old. Even as old as mankind itself! Older than, like, anything! And changing it will result in several really horrible things that will destroy all of society, even us gays who don't know what we're toying with.

So I've decided to try to meet some of those doubts and fears head-on. I've taken the liberty of copying verbatim some of the comments in support of Prop. 8 that concerned citizens left in various articles about the subject at CNN.com, and I'd like to address them one by one.

Let's say that I don't want you to ignore any, and that we'll take a strict interpretation of the Bible as the basis for laws concerning marriage in the United States. I'm happy to report that your amendment now reads like this:

Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen 29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5) Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21) A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21) Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen 24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh 10:30) A contract of marriage is for life. Neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

I feel more marriage-inclined, how 'bout you?

Does being born gay make it right? If so, what about those that are born predisposed to being an alcoholic, drug addict, murderer, or a pedophile? Do we vote to allow them there(sic) right to do what they feel in there(sic) mind is the right thing? What about procreation? What would happen on a secluded island filled with all men, or only all women? If we were to travel back to that island in 120 years, how many humans would we find? None. Homosexual sex does not allow for procreation.

Wow, that's a really compelling argument and you make a lot of points. None of them make any sense, but you do make a lot of them.

First of all, I want to thank you for equating me as a gay man with all alcoholic, drug-addicted murdering pedophiles. I think that's probably apt. As much as being born straight wouldn't make it "right" either, assuming one is "born straight."

But let's set that one aside, pending evidence that your proposition is correct, and look at the second part. "What about procreation?" you ask. As far as I know, marriage isn't a necessary prerequisite for procreation, nor do all couples who are married eventually procreate. Indeed, many married couples can't have children at all, so I suppose there should be some sort of medical test and legal requirement that those who want to be married must be able to procreate and, more than that, intend to do so.

May I also ask about this fun-sounding island you mention? Where, exactly, is that? Is it clothing-optional, and who brings the Tequila?

I am not against gay people. I have known several in my life and get along with them just fine. I still don't feel it is right for them to be married. It is like approving of a choice that goes against the normal rules of God, nature and society. If they choose to be gay that is fine, but I don't think it is something to be bonded into marriage. I have also been around several drug users. They were fine to be around as well. I still don't think drugs should be legalized.

It gladdens my gay little heart that you're "not against gay people." And I'm certainly also glad that you "get along with them just fine." May I say for all gay people that I am not against straight people, and try not to judge them too harshly because they are straight. I try to imagine that being straight doesn't define everything about them in one fell swoop, although I cannot help thinking that George W. Bush and Mahatma Gandhi are so much alike! It's, like, weird.

There's that phrase equating homosexuality and drug abuse again. I have to wonder why that keeps cropping up. On the one hand, I understand the need to frame homosexuality as a negative on society and destructive to those individuals who are gay. It makes it easier to pass laws against us, and to exclude and define us as dangerous. As such, I'd like to suggest an alternative that will accomplish the same goal for you, but avoid the negative connotations.

Being gay is like being naked. It's fine, as long as you don't do it in public. And what kind of world would it be if we were all naked! Imagine the procreation! See? I managed to make being gay seem bad to the point that we should pass laws to confine it, and threw in procreation at the same time! Like magic!

"The normal rules of God, nature and society" seems like a very broad set of rules. Firstly, are there abnormal rules? If so, we'd probably fall into that group. They're still rules, of course, just less normal.

Then there's the second classification that these rules fall into three categories at once: God's rules, nature's rules and society's rules. I covered God's rules above, so I hope you'll understand when the government has to kill every non-virgin wife. Maybe the men involved in those marriages could all go live on that island where they'll all be dead in 120 years! Two birds, one stone kind of a thing.

Nature's rules are kind of up for grabs. I mean, there's the evolution thing, which I'll assume you also disagree with on the basis of the word "theory" so let's lean, instead, toward the "intelligent design" school of rules. Using that logic, that "someone" (God, wink, wink) had to have had a hand in making nature, we pull nature's rules back in with God's rules as the same thing, and since I already covered that, then... not a lot more to say.

"The normal rules of ... society" is a bit problematic, since they can be redefined by the majority, unless I'm misinterpreting your definition of society and it's not, also, the whole God and nature thing. But let's listen to our next guest for more on society!

"It's destructive to society!" That's right. YOu are married so you can procreate into a family. Granted, not every couple can have children, but when you openly chose to deny this possibility (art. insemination and adoption aside), openly choose to rob society of children raised in "real" families...you are harming the natural evolution of society...period.

Wow. Harsh. And I like the "...period" you attached to the end, which I assume means that you're not even willing to listen to alternative views or discuss your opinion. But now we're on my blog and I get to do whatever I want to! I certainly wish it was more like an island filled with bare-chested, lusty men but we can't have everything. Obviously.

I also applaud your use of quotes around "real" when referring to the family structure, qualifying the idea of families as being only one thing. Plus, imaginary families are such a pain. I mean, who do the kids look to when it's time to get tucked in? And also coupling "natural" and "evolution," implying that societies do evolve, but only in natural ways, because they're of nature. Or in nature. Or part of nature, like trees and non-gay birds. Because the gay thing is unnatural, so society will never conform to acceptance. Or something. Sorry, you did kind of lose me there.

Anyhoo, you're lumping marriage and procreation together again as the only possible reason that anyone should get married. Which would be fine if being married yielded the only possible method of procreation, which we both know isn't true at all, or that there were no other benefits in marriage in society other than the right or ability to procreate -- can we say "have children" instead of "procreate?" Or, for that matter, "fucking?"

Let's use fucking.

Okay, if we assume that one may only fuck within the bonds of holy matrimony, and that the only reason for fucking is to make children, then your proposition proves correct.

The problem is that we have to ignore all the other legal benefits of marriage, including tax benefits, next of kin questions, who gets the money when we die and we neglected to leave a will, where the federal government pention goes to if the partner of a man is not a woman (or anyone else by marriage) and so forth. Given that the machinery of marriage includes so much more than fucking and children, I must politely remove your period.

Gays and lesbians are free. What important civil rights are they missing? Things are just not perfect, and they are too picky and self-centered to stand back and enjoy their freedoms. Hanging up over the word "marriage" seems like a worthless battle. This is a lousy time to make a mountain out of a mole hill.

For the record, I personally have never equated my fight for equality with the racial or religious minorities who have also struggled to attain some measure of equal footing in the laws of the land. I don't think they're the same thing, though there are obvious similarities. But since it's easier to hide one's sexuality than the color of one's skin or where one attends church, I more or less sighed and accepted that homosexuals would never be accepted as worthy of the same rights (and responsibilities) that straight people enjoy and accept.

But I have to admit that your statement really knocks me for a loop. I'm going to assume you're not gay, since you refer to us as "they," which means you have never dealt with the kind of prejudice and fear that we deal with every day. Do people like yourself have any idea what it feels like when people proclaim with ease and no apparent sense of shame that they fear having "homosexuality taught in schools" -- I'm gay and even I don't know what that means. Are there "being straight" classes I missed? I mean, other than getting beat up on the blacktop or living in constant fear of being found out, resulting in more, y'know, beating up.

What, exactly, are these classes going to entail? Hairstyling? Flower arranging? Butt fucking 101? I really love the way you manage to toss out the entire idea that gays and lesbians (and you forgot transgendered) have anything to grouse about at all, because we're free to be ourselves without recrimination or fear that we'll be fired from our jobs (in Arizona) or refused the right to adopt (in Arkansas) or recognition of any benefits whatsoever similar to marriage regardless of what that union is called (Virginia, Michigan and Ohio). So thanks for writing all that off as being "too picky." And I'm sorry we intruded on your own imperfect life. Please go back to being universally loving rather than self-centered like us gays.

Why do gays and lesbians fight to redefine marriage? I have no problem with them wanting medical coverage for their spouse, I have no problem with them wanting visitation when one of them is in the hospital. But yet they struggle to redefine an existing institution. Blacks don't fight to be called white, Grocery stores don't fight to be called florist, and women don't fight to be called men.

The oversimplification aside, we're not actually trying to "redefine" anything.

What is marriage today (or more precisely, prior to November 4, 2008) in the state of California? According to the 4-3 ruling by the California Supreme Court that Proposition 8 seeks to overturn, "the state Constitution's guarantees of personal privacy and autonomy protect the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with the person of one's choice. The Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as opposite-sex couples."

So who's actually attempting to redefine marriage in California?

It's you! Funny. But not ha-ha funny, if you get my drift.

Speaking of, your attempt at humor in there, with the whole "blacks don't fight to be called white" thing? So not funny. Plus, I don't recall ever demanding to be called "straight." Or "stupid."

While I believe that homosexual individuals have the right to fair and equal treatment under the law, my personal belief is that the legalization of same-sex marriage would result in a significant decline in the civil rights of religious individuals.

The larger argument here stems from something that happened in Massachusetts where a second-grade class was read a book called "King &smp; King" that suggests that when a prince marries a prince rather than a princess, that's perfectly okay. In a subsequent court case, which the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear without comment, the parents of one child sued the state citing their First Amendment free exercise of religion rights and their parental and privacy rights under the 14th Amendment's due-process clause. The panel ruled that "there is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations."

Separately, in another related case, they also said, "public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, particularly when the school imposes no requirement that the student agree with or affirm those ideas."

In other words, the mere dissemination of ideas does not imply or enforce acceptance of those ideas. Or, in other other words, taching about something that's perfectly legal isn't illegal, whether you agree with it or not, in a public school.

So the parents felt they had no alternative but to take their children out of school and homeschool them, so they're protected from any bad or wrong ideas which might tempt them to become gay, or drug-addicted, or murderers, or pedaphiles, and that they could grow up to be weird and antisocial and not gay at all, even a little bit, because we all turned gay when first presented with the idea of it, which is so appealing. Because, as we all know, once you're presented with the idea of "gay," you simply can't help yourself from wanting cock. It's just how it works. You want some right now, don't you? Because I said "gay." Oops.

(Marriage is) a standard for the development and support of healthy families. Gays have no right to redefine and destroy that standard. They mock and distort everything. They mock marriage, They mock the integrity of the civil rights movement. They insult our intelligence with rants of bigotry, that are so obviously out of context to anyone who knows the truth. Everyone who's worked in law enforcement has seen this sort of misleading smoke screen to mask corruption.

I'm happy to be lumped in to a universal definition of 'gay,' particularly when you suggest that one of our main goals, as a people, AKA "The Gays," is to mock and distory everything. I think this very article does an excellent job of illustrating that goal and proving your point. I mock you! Mock, mock, mock!

I'm not sure I've ranted about bigotry enough, though, to help you, nor to insult your intelligence with said ranting and/or mocking, not to mention distorting. So here's my rant about bigotry: When you refer to every member of a group by a derogutory title, AKA "The Gays," which in itself, I would agree, is not derogutory but within the context of your comments, I don't think it's a stretch to say that you don't mean it as a compliment, then you're engaging in bigotry.

A bigot is, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, "a person who is prejudiced in their views and intolerant of the opinions of others." Going a couple of steps further, "prejudiced" means, literally, to pre-judge, and "intolerant" means, well, not tolerant, or unable to endure specified conditions. So when you engage in throwing around some broad, negative accusations pointed at a particular group based on the activties or opinions of a few of them, you're engaging in bigotry, whether that insults your intelligence or not. Sorry to be the barer of bad news.

As for the right to redefine and destroy marriage, I think you may be combining two verbs that have no logical connection. Redefining something does not destroy it, though destroying something could certainly be a redefinition of it, I must admit.

However, far from trying to destroy something, we merely want to be included in its many benefits, and I would also have to throw in that the definition of marriage completely depends on whom you ask, since I'm pretty sure I covered the whole Bible thing prior in this testament of mine. Marriage can be more than one woman to one man, and may include brothers, sisters and fathers according to prevailing details, so let's agree that neither you nor I am about to redefine or destroy that definition.

And finally we come to the last universal declaration in your statement, that "everyone who's worked in law enforcement" can see this for what it really is; a corruption mask. Which is phrase I must admit I enjoy very much and may start using on a daily basis whenever my coffee order is fulfilled incorrectly or I discover that someone in the 12 items or less line has 13. "That's a misleading smokescreen to mask corruption!" Love it.

So, corruption. Being corrupt has a few definitions, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that the one you wish to convey here is "evil or morally depraved." So that the unstated and secret goal of "the gays" is to redefine and destroy marriage because we are, in essence, depraved individuals who want everyone else to fall into the same category. We want, in the end, for everyone to be gay.

While that would be certainly more convenient from a dating aspect and possibly help to alleviate the fairly broadranging loathing of homosexuals that pervades the general population over the age of, say, 30, it's not at all what any of us want, far as I know from the discussions we have at our gay induction center meetings. No, we'd settle for being treated with the same respect that our straight friends, by and large, receive by not being gay, i.e. marriage. Fairness is all we're asking. Not destruction of an institution.

Whew! Well, that was a lot to digest, wasn't it? I elected not to respond to the most angry and vituperative comments that used some rather overt hatred and name-calling, only because there's really not a lot I can offer those people and they're unlikely to stop thinking of me as "an animal" with no right even to live among decent human beings and why don't I just shut up and go shoot myself instead, sort of a thing. After all, this is America, land of the free, home of the brave, place of the tolerant, thing of the separate but equal.

The struggle will continue. Maybe we'll shift our focus from marriage to one of the other injustices we contend with, though none of that, whether it's successful or not, will ever end the hatred of homophobics about homosexuality. It isn't as if racism has suddenly disappeared, is it? Or sexism. Or religious intolerance.

It's just that there are federal laws on the books that state that none of that matters when it comes to marriage.

Only one thing -- about a certain class of people -- does.

With the recent decision by California to strip straight couples of their Constitutional right to marriage -- a decision already echoed in one way or another by 29 other states, including GeorgiaArkansas voters' (sorry, it's easy to get confused, but since neither state allows you to get married, who cares?) recent approval of denying straight people from adopting children -- I feel it's important now to help those of you struggling with your lifestyle choice, and to help you fit in with those of us who are normal.

I know you may be feeling depressed right now, but please believe that not all of us gay people think you're entirely sick, depraved, abnormal and not deserving of love. After all, marriage is almost exactly the same as a civil union, accept for some of the things about next of kin and so forth, but since you so rarely stay with your partners for more than a few years and insist on fooling around so much, does that really matter? And this was in no way a referendum on legitimizing prejudice or discrimination with an attempt to place these definitions into the state constitution. We don't hate you.

We just think you're not entitled to the same rights as us. I mean, really, how can you possibly argue with that while you're cheating on your spouses and wearing those outlandish clothes?

I hope I've been able to provide some good, down-to-earth rules for you and that I've managed to pick up your spirits after yesterday's triumphant -- er, I should say, disappointing failure of your fellow Californians to screw with the natural order of things and start treating you with equality, or however you're phrasing the idea that a straight couple should enjoy the same rights as a gay couple.

I can't honestly say "I know how it feels" because I'm gay so I'm normal. And I wish I could offer some advice other than "get over it," and "what did you expect?" Straight people are weird, you want all these special rights and unfair treatment. Next thing you know you'll want schools to start teaching that being straight is as natural as being gay.

Right. Like that'll ever happen.

• A domestic partnership is not the same as marriage. If it is the same as marriage, I would like to propose that we do away with marriage entirely and only have domestic partnerships. Now, feel the same way about domestic partnerships?
• I am not in a "lifestyle choice." I am gay. Choice had no point in my life, and if there was a choice it came very late in life and it was to finally like myself and stop believing I was the horrible person others believed me to be.
• A yes vote on Prop. 8 removes rights, it doesn't define them.
• I don't think this has anything to do with race or the fact that California used to deny other people the right to marriage based on skin color. This is about me and my rights, and the desire by some to strip me of them. Because I am gay.
• Maybe your yes vote doesn't mean you hate me. It only feels that way to me.

It's weird to me that this is happening at all. I never would have believed there would ever be a question about equal rights for homosexuals on a state ballot during my lifetime. I always sort of expected and accepted that I would forever be a second-class citizen because I came out of the closet at last and managed at last to accept myself, never believing that everyone/anyone else would.

But here we are. And here it is.

Please, if anything I ever wrote, said, made or designed had a positive effect on you or someone you know, if you know anyone else who is gay, or if you understand that everyone should be treated the same way when it comes to questions of love and happiness, vote no tomorrow on Proposition 8.

Please. Vote no.

Take, for example, the Case of the Expensive T-shirt Designer That Didn't Bother to Do His or Her Proper Research Regarding the Origin of the Particular Flickr Account Owner of the Image They Thought They Could Simply Borrow-Slash-Steal for Part of the Graphic on One of Their Over-Priced Garments Except That They Had No Right to Do So and Then They Got Caught by the Originator's Boyfriend.

Deepak Chopra may consider that there's no such thing as coincidence, in which case God has a fucking great sense of humor and suddenly a lot of the crap I put up with on a daily basis makes a little more sense when considered in relation to the fact that a lot of it is done in the name of God and there isn't one, but the sequence of events that had to conspire together to lead up to what ended up happening during my recent trip to New York City are just slim enough when taken one at a time and incredibly odd when combined together to make me reconsider my opinion about fate.

And, yes, if you think I'm going to abandon my love for run-on sentences at some point in the future on this, my blog, then you're as insane as Deepak Chopra, though probably a lot less financially well off, so maybe you should shut up about how dumb he is or how annoying I am and write your own damn series of books about how other people should live. Go, you.

Robert is a particularly hard target of gift-giving. Firstly, he is in a position, financially, where he could buy pretty much anything that strikes his fancy. Secondly, his fancy is also very fanciful, so a mere book or cheese collection, while nice, isn't quite up to par. For example, he recently purchased thousands of dice in order to assemble a likeness of the Virgin Mary in the top of his coffee table. Now I ask you, when has it ever occurred to you that the perfect present for your significant other is "thousands of dice?" Lastly, his taste and my taste are both, if I do say so myself, excellent. However, my tastes run toward the humorous, weird and colorful, while he tends toward the intelligent, abstract and monochrome. Put another way, if I'm Roald Dahl by way of Salvador Dali, he's Umberto Eco married to Richard Serra.

Prior to leaving for New York, I presented him with a couple of gifts that I had already picked out that wouldn't easily fit in luggage, one being a book by the x-ray photographer-slash-artist Nick Veasey and the other being a 14" tall super-articulated war-fighting robot figurine (complete with severed zombie heads) called Bertie modeled after a series of paintings by Ashley Wood. But there was something missing from all the art and artifice, and that was the practical side of Robert and my need to dress him up like a big, tall, gay Ken doll.

I know, Ken is already gay. Just go with me here.

I'm not saying that Robert is unable to dress himself. I'm saying that Robert dresses for comfort first, appearance second. Not, also, that he isn't always dressed in a presentable fashion, even when he's presenting, and I mean that in a conference-way and not a "I'm presenting!" way, wink wink, nudge nudge. But he will not wear a tie, never owned a suit until I made him buy one, and is the type of man who says "I really like that (insert article of clothing here), but I can't see myself wearing it." Normally, this phrase is applied to anything with a collar, a color palette veering outside the grays and black, or what he considers "too feminine."

As it happens, we are both foodies of the most determined nature, and since Robert and I (but Robert moreso) are also sushi lovers, I made us a reservation at Masa, which is best described as the French Laundry of sushi restaurants. For a last birthday semi-surprise, I wanted to buy Robert a nice dress shirt to wear because I was certain he hadn't brought anything but t-shirts and jeans on the trip.

Luckily, we were staying in Soho, and if there's one thing that Soho has, it's nice clothing stores, including two fairly large outlets for two of my favorite British designers, Paul Smith and Ted Baker.

I will confess an abject love and devotion for Paul Smith. I will also confess that I often find the price tags on Paul Smith togs a bit hard to swallow. Yes, the tailoring is beautiful and the artistic touches and attention to detail are beautiful. He also did a line of clothes in conjunction with eBoy a few years back, so he has some web cred about what's what and who's who. So I headed there with Robert's college friend Tara to search out the perfect shirt for Robert's sensitivities.

I knew that Robert also likes Paul Smith because the one and only suit Robert owns is a Paul Smith. It fit him perfectly, it was has just enough chromatic qualities to appeal to his sensitivities and enough small nods to color (and the signature interior splashiness) to appeal to my sometimes outlandish love of a bright palette.

So in we went, Tara and I, with nothing more in mind that finding "the perfect shirt." And Paul Smith did not disappoint. There were a few shirts I salivated over, as well as a dark blue jacket with sky blue hand stitched details and a perfectly perfect suit in something between shiny and matte that looked smashing on its hanger, though at $4,000 I was more than a bit put off from even trying one on.

We rounded a corner from Mr. Smith's executive wear section into the low-end jeans line, Red Ear (low-end for Mr. Smith means $200 t-shirts and $50 socks) and I was stopped in my tracks when I spotted what appeared to be a maroon sweatshirt with a silkscreened bird flocking print that reminded my strongly of an experiment Robert had been working on in Processing to simulate those giant clouds of birds that move and swoop and reorganize in the sky based on who knows what. He'd captured a few screen grabs of the resulting animation and had uploaded them to his Flickr account in March of 2007. And here was a similar image on a Paul Smith sweatshirt.

Turned out it was a long-sleeved T-shirt. Turned out it was $235. Turned out I didn't buy it for Robert. Instead, we left the store and ventured to "Paul Smith Lite" AKA Ted Baker (and if Mr. Baker is reading this, my apologies, but it's how I look at your stuff) and managed, with Tara's help, to find a nice shirt that coupled my need to dress Robert in something out of the ordinary with Robert's need to appear as ordinary as possible. (If Robert is reading this, my apologies, but you know what I mean.)

I gifted him with the shirt that day and that was that. He wore the shirt to Masa on Friday night and looked quite dashing, if I do say so myself.

Saturday morning dawned warmish and threatening, with storms called for in the forecast and a full day with nothing to do in New York City for two gay men in Soho. First thought in my head: "Let's go shopping!" I wanted to head back over to Paul Smith again to show him some of what he almost wore to dinner, and to show him that sweatshirt that reminded me of his work.

It was spitting rain and the streets were overrun with shoppers and tourists as we made our way from the hotel to the store. I showed him the jacket I liked so much and a couple of the dress shirts I considered to see if I made the right decision with the Ted Baker (and I had) and then I showed him the "flock of birds" top, still sitting all nicely folded on its shelf, still priced at $235.

He looked at it and said, yes, it looked remarkably similar to his piece. He took out his iPhone and took a couple of quick pictures of it and we left, moving through the crowds again to get back to the hotel because the skies were no longer spitting at us, they had started to openly weep.

Back in our room, Robert opened up his laptop and steered the browser to his Flickr account to take a look at his own "flock of birds" images to compare the two. It was still kind of giddy and weird that they looked so much alike, and then he pulled the image into Photoshop and flipped it and reversed it and imported the shirt picture from his cameraphone and...

They were so similar that they were, in fact, exactly the same. The upper left portion of Robert's copyrighted flocking image had been used on Paul Smith's long-sleeve T-shirt. Robert superimposed his own image on top of the t-shirt design, tugged at the edges to account for the angle and material stretching, and there was absolutely no doubt. They were the same images.

So we stood there looking down at the laptop's glowing screen and the undeniable evidence that Paul Smith's T-shirt was using Robert Hodgin's image. He asked me, "Can they do that? Just take my image and use it?"

I said, "It depends on what kind of copyright control you placed on it. Are you using a Creative Commons license? There are some differences about what someone else can and can't do with your posted images."

"Where do I find that?"

We looked around in his Flickr account settings and everything in it was covered with an "all rights reserved" license.

"So... he can't do that."

I shook my head with a slight grimace. "All rights reserved means all rights. He has to ask you for permission or he has to pay you or whatever agreement you come up with between you and him. But, no, he can't simply take your image, flip it around, paste on some more birds and sell his T-shirt for $235 using your design. He can't do that."

"I'm buying it."

It was, easily, one of the weirdest moments of my life. It seemed to me that by now, everyone knows you can't simply use someone else's stuff without permission. It seemed to me that Paul Smith, or possibly Paul Smith's lackeys, and quite definitely Paul Smith's attorneys, know this to be true, particularly when it comes to protecting Paul Smith's signature stripe or Paul Smith's rabbit logo on his shoes or the name Paul Smith. There's no, like, slim difference when it comes to copyright.

Then I was thinking about the circumstances leading to Robert standing in this New York hotel room over his laptop staring at undeniable proof that a shirt designed in London and manufactured in Hong Kong by a well-known and reputable design label had gone through the process of designing, approving, making, pricing and selling -- in its own store -- a shirt using an image found in someone's Flickr account with what I can only assume was a kind of lessez faire attitude about "borrowing" someone else's work to integrate into a design because, you know, who'd ever find out? What are the chances that the guy who made the one single image among millions would wander into a Paul Smith boutique and find the one, exact shirt among hundreds of articles of clothing that featured his work?

I mean, really, what are the chances?

We returned to the store and Robert did buy it, after trying it on (again, a perfect fit -- kudos, Paul!) and, I must admit, he looked quite fetching in it. He wore the shirt he had an unknowing part in designing the rest of the day, admiring his own handiwork and wondering what he would do about it.

Me, I think Mr. Smith or whomever was assigned within the Paul Smith brand to come up with a new bird-based shirt, missed an opportunity. One small extra step could've yielded a much more interesting piece of clothing, if they had only asked Robert about the design.

See, the design is based on a piece of flocking programming that continually creates unique patterns of thousands of bird silhouettes. Coincidentally, Robert's company, The Barbarian Group, designed a system for CNN that could create T-shirts on the fly based on any headline appearing at CNN.com, so that (if used as designed) everyone who visited CNN.com could potentially click a link and get their own unique headline shirt. Maybe only one person gets it, maybe a dozen, maybe a hundred.

What if they combined Robert's flocking program, the CNN.com headline shirt idea and Paul Smith's label together and for $300 instead of $235, anyone wishing to get their very own, one-of-a-kind, completely original and unique Paul Smith "flock of birds" print would have one made on the fly and delivered to them via FedEx in less than a week.

But, no. Instead, someone (probably) thought, "Everything on Flickr is free for the taking! I can use anything I want to because they're publishing it online so that must mean yodda, yodda, yodda. I suppose I could, like, ask for permission. Uhhhhh, no, I'll just use this, flip it around, no one will ever know. I mean, what are the chances?"

Except that I flew to New York with my boyfriend, the designer, and went out looking for a nice dress shirt for our expensive sushi dinner and found your shirt on a shelf in a Paul Smith boutique. Welcome to the web, Mr. Smith, where nothing ever hides.

Read Robert's take.

Aside: This happens a lot more than it did on Windows. But I am somehow more forgiving of it on my Apple. I am asked repeatedly "Did you try to force quit the application?" to which I always reply "Of course" while thinking to myself, "Why should I the need to continually force-quit applications be any better than the need to continually force-boot the whole blasted mess?" But I digress.

After rebooting and hearing the familiar Apple "Taa daaah!" start up chime, I am greeted with a dark screen and nothing else. No sign from the universe that the OS is starting up, no login, nothing but a big, black, blank screen.

After trying several things suggested by several people more Mac-savvy than I ("Did you try to remove the battery and press the power button to clear the something or other?" "Did you hold down the something and press something to clear the e-prom doohicky thingamabob?" "Did you throw it at the wall? How many times?") it is decided that the thing has succumbed to the now infamous Nvidia 8300M bad video card plague and the hard drive is "probably" okay, but I cannot see anything at all.

This morning, during a 9am Genius Bar visit (side note: If you need to visit the Genius Bar at your local Apple store for any reason, make an appointment before 10am. The store here doesn't open until 10am, but accepts Genius Bar appointments starting at 8am. If you arrive for an early apointment, a nice Apple employee will personally escort you to the Genius Bar, get your essentials, log you in to your appointment and take good care of you in your hour of need. So much better than trying to contend with a packed store filled with looky-loos while you're fretting over your broken thingie) I was informed that, yes, it is very likely that the video card has failed since, like, no video works at all but the hard drive appears to be "all there." So, yay, good for me, something went wrong but it was half-expected anyway and now it's happened and it'll get fixed for free.

Upon returning home, I started trying to figure out what to do without my main computer for the 3-5 days it will take to get it back. I have a Mac mini I usually use as a media server to house all my music, movies and TV shows and I hooked it up to my Cinema Display and it's making due after loading its poor little low-power CPU and 1Gb of RAM with Photoshop, Coda, Transmit, Office and every other "essential" application that gets me through the workday, but it lacks everything personal that I have loaded on my laptop.

I've never had this happen to me before, and I suddenly feel like I've gone partially blind. Safari on my laptop remembers all my logins and passwords. Do you realize how often you have to login to something? It's a freaking lot. None of the docs I was working with are here. None of the files. None of the little personalized traits like the apps in the dock, the apps on the desktop, the icons in the top right. Everything is just slightly off. It feels really weird.

Now, I know as well as you who are already itching to add your comment to this post that "Time Machine backs up your entire computer so you can easily recreate it!" or "It only takes a few hours to load the applications you need and start over," that you're missing the point so let me make it more clear. What I realized as I walked into my living space sans the piece of my life that holds all my data and the carefully arranged environment I stare at more than almost anything else and the nearly effortless connection I have to the online world is that being without it made me feel oddly disabled.

Part of what I take for granted is that I can go look at my computer screen and inhabit that world comfortably and with a familiarity that I don't find anywhere else. When I used to drive, I kind of had that connection to my car. Key in hand, seat arranged just so, controls where I like them, foot on the pedal, and off I go. My computer is like that, only multiplied by, like, a million.

You can always remove yourself from it by choice, for sure. Go on computer vacation and never check e-mail (unless you have an iPhone) and never get WiFi access in your hotel room and never worry about what's going on the world at CNN.com or NYTimes.com or the blogs you regularly check or the friends who live -- at least partially -- online. Frankly, I've tried it and it sucks. It's too much a part of my life now, rather than a peripheral of it. I rely on my computer and the web to be part of my life, and when the familiarity of my own computer is taken away from me, even when it's replaced by another one, I am left lost and forlorn.

I'm surprised by this, but I shouldn't be. The laptopification of my life is now complete, and it's both comforting and jarring. One arm doesn't work. My leg has gone numb. I've lost the ability to taste saltiness. I am blind in one eye.

Where's my laptop?

I should say that for a Republican in this day and age when Republican equates with people who are more concerned that Jesus is happy that if everyone else actually living on the planet who aren't Saviors was happy.

Now, I know perfectly well that there are sensible Republicans, because I know one or two, and there are sensible Christians as well, and it's a shame that a small albeit boisterous minority has highjacked that political party because they realized that if they plugged in to the, shall we say, vehemently angry (who need someone or somthing to blame for anything they disagree with, and that tends to be abortion and the gays and flag burning and gay flag burners who are aborting and getting married and marrying gay abortions) who can be lured to the voting booths because they're incensed, incensed I tell you, by the way modern American culture (that's you and me, in case you were wondering) is going to hell, apparently literally, while the rest of us with a more lessez faire atttude about things in general, live and let live, whatever you do in your bedroom, all teaching is good, and so forth are in direct opposition to their opinions about sequestering us all in some ignorant, narrow-minded view of a world where we should live in fear of being judged by some powerful invisible all-knowing force who occasionally decides to destroy a city or trun people into salt or demand the death of a first-born or whatever (and those are His good qualities) but thinks using sex organs for something other than pumping out babies to pump out more babies in a never-ending cycle of procreation with no other end-goal as far as I know except to eventually die and go live with this judgmental egotist because he considers himself perfect and not you, you fornicating flag burning gay abortion!

Sorry, I'm on a jet flying to New York while I write this and I had to wake up at 4AM and I'm on my fourth cup of coffee.

Then came Palin. Goveror Sarah Palin. Never heard of her, of course, and why should I have? I can't name anyone's governor except mine, and that's only because he's a majot celebrity and is married to a skeleton, which is both weird and cool. McCain isn't a governor, but he is married to some kind of harlot or something, or so I've been informed. Homewrecker kind of a girl. Married her so quickly after his divorce that, wink wink, maybe they "knew" each other even before they were married, but that's all hearsay and conjecture and sometimes love works in mysterious ways, but enough about gay marriage.

I immediately thought -- no, in fact as I recall, I said it out loud when it was announced that he'd picked some inexperienced hot lady governor that he was going for the Hillary vote, and then there was the no abortion talk and the Down Syndrome child and she just will keep haing every baby she can, ding dang it, and I thought, oh, okay, perfect, now he can grab the Hillary vote and get the concerned evangelicals too! It's a political masterstroke and who the hell cares if she's qualified to run the local PTA (she probably is, I've never been to a PTA meeting and in my head I imagine it's a lot of cookies and streamers and soapbox derby trophies and not a lot of Parent Teacher discussion since it seems like everyone wants to yank their kids out of public school and teach them at home where they turn into these weird Zombie children who have no idea how to interact with anyone because, ooh, scary, and what's sex, anyway and I'm gonna grow up to be a shut-in until I learn how to use a gun) because she's a she and she "talks plain talk" as if that's a great thing to have going for you sitting around a table with the other heads of state who, one presumes, have actually visited other countries rather than stare at them in paranoia from one's front porch.

Sarah Palin is the scariest thing I have ever seen. This is like some horrid "Left Behind" book, you know, early in the story where no one's yet aware that the rapture is nigh but odd things are taking place and some horrible chain of seemingly unrelated events is leading up to nuclear (or is it nucular?) annihilation because the country, lulled into somnabulent fearful drooling over a candidate who never talks to the press and marches around in her political gatherings drumming up fear and loathing and didn't Stephen King write about this already? Is a plague coming? Do I have to sleep with Molly Ringwald to repopulate the Earth? I suppose there are worse things than that.

Oh my God, Virgin America has some fucking tasty coffee!

On the one hand it's easy to be in hate with Mrs. Palin and the "first dude," who may be even scarier than her, if that's posible, only we'll never know or maybe we will when it's too late and he's the Cheney behind the Bush pulling her strings (ooh, baby!) and succeeding finally in his dearest wish to make the country implode leaving only Alaska and what the hell is going on up there, anyway? Is that the new survivalist Unibomber frontier? Is that where the crazies go who love America so much that they have to destroy it? Are they stockpiling oil and natural gas for the rapture, and why would they need to do that if they're all going up to heaven anyway?

I'm actually kind of scared in my heart and soul that the following plausible scenario will occur:

1. Obama supporters, overly confident and slightly smug decide to stay home on election day because, after all, he's ahead in the polls and who, in their right mind, would want four more years of a Republican agenda to systematically destroy the country, haul us into the poor house, make us hated by our former allies and drag the value of the once-proud dollar further into the toilet?
2. The McCain/Palin ticket is elected by the slimmest of margins, curiously enough the swing states that use electronic voting all go Republican.
3. The day after the inauguration, McCain dies from a severe cold he got while giving his acceptance speech.
4. President Sarah Palin names Todd Palin as her Vice President.
5. Three Supreme Court judges die or retire. Palin moves her candidates in quickly because it's "a judicial emergency thinger" and Congress, as usual, caves.
6. The new Supreme Court somehow manaages to declare the entire Constitution unconstitutional and the legisative branch is disbanded.
7. Sarah steps down and Todd declares himself Emporer of America.

See? See how easy it is? Because if the current financial crisis proves anything, it's that no one has any clue about what's happening until it's too late even though the signs were there all along and the people in charge are too scared to do anything about it in case they get blamed and lose their cushy do-nothing jobs and have to go back home and figure out exactly what they're going to do for a living now that they're not qualified to do anything except ruin the global economy and whine that it's someone else's fault.

Well, Mr. Battery meter is in the red and telling me it's time to wrap things up and get another cup o' Joe, so in conclusion, if you're thinking your vote isn't important and you're not going to be able to justle your complacent butt from that couch and get to your polling place and fucking stop the madness, I would like to insert two words as your mantra until election day so you'll remember what the fuck you were trying to remember what it was you were supposed to be doing on November 3rd.

Emporer Palin.

Linux, of course, is out there and readily available in a number of different forms, but whose mom or dad is considering switching from Windows to Linux? They don't need to worry about that in the hearts and minds of the average consumer. They need to worry about Apple.

So the first thing they did was attempt to make some weird, nonsense, "funny" ads starring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates as Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The two ads I saw pointed out that neither Jerry Seinfeld nor Bill Gates has any idea what it's like to be human. They're so rich, so famous and so removed from anything the rest of us deal with that they need to comically insert themselves into the lives of "average Americans" to get back in touch with what it means to be white, middle class and suburban.

How this, in any way, endears them or Microsoft to the buying public eludes me entirely. It's awkward, it's embarrassing, and it does more to point out how out of touch they are in their little bullet-proof glass cage than it does to show us all how they know who we are, what we do, and how they can make life and leisure easier and more fun.

I am now an Apple user for one main reason: Windows Vista sucks. You cannot convince me that it doesn't suck. I've used it, or tried to, and I hated it. Because it sucks. It's a bloated, candy-coated operating system that tries to anticipate me rather than let me rule my own computer use. It's not a teacher taking me by the hand and showing me a better way, it's a 4-year-old stumbling around and shouting and it gets in my way a lot more often than it acts cute.

Prior to the Seinfeld failure, Microsoft had an online viral campaign that attempted to show that Vista isn't bad, that it's really, really good and that they can fool people into thinking it's something it's not by showing them pieces of it without letting them touch it. Those of us who have actually tried to use it know better.

It sucks.

Digging out of that hole is impossible. I'm sure their ad agency has told them the only way to fight this fire is by ignoring it and going in another direction, so now we have them actively trying to counteract Apple's on-going and successful "I'm a Mac" campaign with their own "I'm a PC" campaign, attempting to show that PC users don't all look like John Hodgman and they do things like grow beards, support John McCain, build houses out of shrubs and wear glasses.

Wow. So entirely wrong. Again!

Microsoft, if you're listening, here's what you want to do: You know all those cool things you were showing people in that viral campaign that we couldn't see? The things that they all thought were so cool? The things, apparently, you're doing such an awful job of explaining to us all in simple, clear, easy to understand terms?

Show them to us. In simple, clear, easy to understand terms. Don't compare yourself to Apple. That's a dumb way to go. Apple needs to compare themselves to you because they're the underdog. You're not the underdog, but now you're acting like you've already lost. Frankly, you're not going to get me -- or people like me -- back. You already did lose us. But if you're trying to convince other people you're cool, you have to walk the walk. What did those people actually see? Show that to us, rather than their reaction to it. One bite-sized chunk at a time. "Look at this! This is cool!" And show us what that is.

Stop with the parade of faces and the weird "we're normal" campaigns. Get back to the product. If you stand behind Vista, then sell it to us based on its merits.

And by the way? This doesn't help. If you're not going to use your own software, at least use your own OS.

I agree with that sentiment.

However -- and predicated on the fact that I am not a reporter, nor a "political blogger," nor officially affiliated with either presidential campaign -- I'm finding it particularly hard in this instance to separate the fact that one political party has made it a primary goal in its agenda to govern my personal life, and judge who I am and what I do on moral grounds that become, to them, legal grounds, added to the fact that they do all in their power to attempt to move into the bedrooms of America and tell us all how we are supposed to conduct our personal lives, including what we must believe in or not believe in according to the precepts of a book written several thousand years ago by a group of men concerned mostly with controlling the population through fear (and just a little bit about loving our fellow man, which is, after all, what I try to practice in my life, albeit a bit more literally than intended by them, I'm quite sure), and the fact that a constant in all their preaching, namely favoring the preaching of abstinence over the teaching of contraception, is blowing up in their pompous, judgmental little faces.

An underaged, unwed girl is pregnant. Not news. Happens all the time. But what they keep telling us and what they'd have us believe is that running one's life and one's family according to their rules would solve this particular problem. That somehow protecting young people from the horrors of rubbers and the pill and any one of the myriad ways in which pregnancy can be avoided in the inevitability of sex will prevent them from becoming pregnant, and here we have ample proof if ever there was any -- I mean, if that mother wasn't a poster Mom for abstinence and the Christian way of life, who the hell is? -- that it's all bullshit.

So, I will refrain from making the happy occasion of a new life entering our world through the usual methods into a political theme. But excuse me while I sit over here laughing my ass off at the hypocrisy and utter irony of the situation. Thank you.

He was particular and peculiar about his sandwich, or so it seemed, because the vegetables were important. And how much. And how many.

"More tomatoes, please," and I thought him polite, at least, though he was holding up the line, and the rest of us, from our choices. He had a large backpack over one shoulder, and kept hitting the man behind him with it, shifting, peering at the lettuce and peppers.

"No, too many," he corrected. His head was shaven, close, but not entirely. He was animated and anxious and we all were because there was a train to catch and a sandwich to assemble and our turns depended on his decisions, alone, and we all stood there, animated and anxious, and the train was waiting.

"Mayo. Mayonnaise. Just a little. No mustard. Salt and pepper."

It was almost my turn, and in my head, I thought 'I'm better than he is, because I am aware of my compatriots here in line with me, it isn't just about my needs, but it's okay, he knows what he wants, why is it taking him so long, the sandwiches are stacking up, what if mine is wrong because his is so right, and the train is waiting.'

He was done, then, and then another man wanted only lettuce and tomato, and then there was me, and the small girl behind the glass, and I gestured across the array of condiments and vegetables and metal trays and said, in one word, what I wanted.

"Everything."

Later: 'Jesus, he laughs loud.'

Due to my extensive experience acting as a creative director, which is considered to be middle management because it is a positioned that is managed by upper management (those concerned primarily with keeping the company healthy rather than dealing with the challenges of actually talking to employees) and manages another layer of people who may, in turn, manage yet another layer though only rarely and in circumstances that I personally have never seen, I thought I would pass along what I learned while in that position as a warning to potential employers of my lack of grace, charm, nuance and comfort in the role as well as a cautionary tale for any creative-minded individuals out there thinking they might want to "move into management" rather than staying exactly where they are, sitting in front of a computer monitor, reading this during working hours.

I should also like to point out that although I was a creative director and had a small staff of worker bees reporting to me, I was also actively engaged as the creative lead on several accounts at the same time so I was not the kind of creative director in a large agency who merely passes judgment on the work of others and is expected to be the mouthpiece for the work to the client instead of someone who actually produced something on a daily basis, assuming enough coffee was readily available.

With that lengthy preamble out of the way, here's my advice to any creative director wannabe out there who believes their lot in life would be greatly improved if they were, you should excuse the expression, "in charge."

Your Primary Responsibility is To the Client

You will be told things like "our employees are our greatest asset" and "your job is not to hand-hold the client." An important lesson to learn early on is that although even the people telling you these things may actually believe them, the exact opposite is true.

Your company won't survive without clients, but there is no employee (including you) so important that replacing them is ever an issue of important consideration to your employer. Your job is to make the client happy at any cost, including personal integrity, embarrassment, accepting the blame for anything that may occur at any point during a given project and apologizing abjectly on behalf of yourself, your team, your company and your higher-ups. You're all idiots, when it comes down to it, and the client is always right. Sell your soul now and give up whatever vestiges of pride about your opinion, your talents, your taste or your capabilities you may have duped yourself into believing.

You Will Have to Fire Your Friends

It's inevitable, since you're all down there in the trenches together, that you will become friends with the people you're expected to manage. If you didn't like them, you probably wouldn't have hired them, and if you came into the job and adopted some people you don't particularly care for, the fact that you're all "in this together" will likely, at some point, foster a grudging respect between you. At any rate, you're going to be spending so much time with these people that you're going to end up considering them to be friends, or at least pals.

Downsizing happens. Or clients leave. Or something. There's always a reason to fire someone. Sometimes it's just a bad fit, and you get to be the one to pull them into a room alone and break the bad news.

Normally, this will not be a surprise to them, because you'll have gone through the motions of putting them on suspension, or warning, or something like that. They got a bad review. Their client hates them. Their work is suffering because someone died. I've seen it all.

What this amounts to is you trying to be "professional" while you tell someone their work sucks and you would prefer if they never came back again. And then you have to have them sign something that's like a "no hard feelings, you can't sue us later because we told you this was coming," and possibly even a "I have to escort you back to your desk now because we can no longer trust you to wander around on your own, so you can collect your meager collection of pictures and toys and books and whatever and get out right now."

Did you know that most employers can fire you for no reason at all? That's right, it's called "employed at will." While you can't legally be fired based on your race, gender, religion or disability, you can still be fired for no reason and they don't actually have to disclose why you were fired. In some states you can still be fired just for being gay, of course. This is America, after all.

It's Best to Surrender Your Sense of Pride Immediately

Maybe it was just me, or my set of circumstances, but I found that I had a very hard time being right. Or on the occasions that it was agreed that I was right, it didn't matter because of one circumstance or another and we had to do the wrong thing, make the wrong choice, go the wrong way, and usually it was because it was what the client wanted.

It's the client's money, after all, and the client's product when all is said and done. But one funny thing about creative endeavors is that everyone has an opinion, whether it's informed or not, and it's arrived at in arbitrary ways and doesn't really require logic to get there. Some people like blue. Some people like green. And some people like teal.

A pause while I say a few words about teal: I don't hate teal, but for me, "teal" has become a word fraught with hidden meaning, because I have a very distinct and powerful memory about a particular project involving a color scheme for a certain product and the client insisted on going with teal, because their agency of record (a company I think had their collective head up their collective ass) had established that teal was going to define this product in all branding documents and material. If you've ever had to try to work with teal, you may know that it's a very distinctive color and somewhat challenging to work around. The color "teal," for me, signifies defeat, surrender, and giving up everything one believes. There was simply no way to fight against it, no matter how poorly teal folded in to the company's established color scheme, because it was a done deal. Even though, honestly, it wasn't -- but it became the battle around which everything else circled like vultures, and having lost the teal war meant giving in on everything for that client from that moment onward. I was always wrong, because I was wrong about teal.

Over the course of my short career as a creative director, perhaps I wasn't the gruff, annoying, finger-pointing asshat that I was supposed to be. Part of a creative director's job is to sit at the meeting table and be immovable in one's convictions. The problem with that position occurs when your management team tells you one thing, but does another. I was often cast as the enemy or the devil behind my back, and then asked to back off from my beliefs or positions creatively because the client didn't like it.

Well, frankly, they're not supposed to like me, they're supposed to trust me. I'm pretty sure I was doing good work, but over the course of time, as every decision I made was second-guessed or overruled, I started to lose my confidence in my ability to make creative decisions. So I stopped making them.

It was like a disease I didn't know I had. It was simply easier, and everyone was happier, if the client made all the creative decisions. Even though a lot of them were bad, wrong and blatantly ugly, all that mattered was the client's happiness. The surrender of power leached outward into every aspect of my life, and I became incapable of making any decisions at all.

In retrospect, it was my own fault for not being better at articulating why teal is bad. That's all it comes down to in management of creative endeavors -- no matter how much experience you have, or knowledge or training, if you can't explain why teal is bad (or good) you're bound to fail.

Beware the Assholes

It was sometimes easy to hate an entire company because the people I was dealing with were, to put it mildly, difficult. Often, the health of the company was the biggest contributing factor. If a company was doing good, the employees felt secure in their jobs, so they were working from a position of power and comfort. If the company was doing poorly, fear was the motivating force and suddenly every decision and every solution came under tight scrutiny and became suspect.

This is completely understandable, since I've been there. I know what it's like not to know what you're going to be doing tomorrow. I know how it feels to be on shaky ground and to wonder if anyone "up there" has any clue about what the hell they're doing.

That said, there are also people who are just assholes. No matter the position they're in, or the health of their company, or who they report to, you're going to run into assholes. They're inside your own company, and they're lurking in the hallways and offices and meetings at your client.

Friend, there's just nothing you can do about that, except to keep in mind that they are the asshole, and they're (hopefully) the only one. Deal with them as assholes. Smile and nod and agree with them. They're always right.

Don't let them turn you into an asshole, too, because there's just no recovering from that once it happens. If you get labeled as an asshole, that's going to stick with you no matter where you go or what you do from then on. And because you become treated like an asshole, your assholishness increases exponentially. Beware!

You're a Manager, Not a Creator

A creative director is expected to wear many hats, but the hardest one for me to wear was Manager. I wasn't trained in business, I don't know anything about running a business, and I'll never be good at it.

But being a manager has almost nothing to do with that, anyway. You're not managing the business, you're managing people. You're managing their expectations and hopes and fears. You're rewarding and punishing them. You're watching them and listening to them and prodding them.

So, I'm not a "people person," I think that's well established by now. I don't enjoy small talk, I don't want to go to Happy Hour, I don't want to join in with team building exercises and cheer on the captain of the company ball team. As such, I'm a rotten manager.

The dichotomy about the creative director is that it's likely that they got to that position be being creative. They're good at designing things, and making things, and directing the designing and making of things. Once a creative director becomes a creative director, however, most of that is stripped away and they're left with saying things like "I like that," or "I don't like that," or "Did you try this?" They need to step away from the box and look over shoulders more. They need to encourage the employees under their direction but not do the job for them.

It's almost entirely unsatisfying for a creative person to try to tell someone else how to do something rather than doing it himself. But that's what you have to do.

The person who succeeded me as executive creative director was kind of an untalented hack. The person may have been good at some point, but for the life of me I could not understand how to go from their scribbled tumbleweeds of inked directions on a sheet of paper to making the logo sing. "Just do this," the person would say, while scribbling three jagged lines and a circle. I suppose that's good creative direction, because it called completely on my creativity and not at all on theirs. But as the person looking for guidance, it was utterly useless and I lost all respect for that person.

It's a fine line, and you have to tread it.

You Will Stop Having Fun Now

If you really want to be a creative director, keep in mind that most of your daily communications are going to deal with unhappy clients, unhappy employees and unhappy managers. Happy people keep to themselves. They're happily coding, or happily designing, or happily... managing. You're only going to hear from people when they're unhappy.

Unhappy clients are the worst thing in the world. They issue threats. They make you feel incompetent. They go over your head to your manager and make them unhappy. It's likely that you're going to have a pile of unhappiness on your desk that keeps getting higher, because unhappy clients make unhappy employees, which make unhappy managers. And you're the only one who understands where all the unhappiness is coming from.

Because it's your fault. Suck it up, accept it, admit it, move on. Unhappiness of this nature can't be easily mitigated by letting it fester. It's also nearly impossible to deal with because it usually concerns egos and opinions and expectations rather than concrete things like missed deadlines or botched launches. In the end, your happiness is the least important, and sacrificing it will make everyone else happy.

Conclusions

You don't actually want to be a creative director. The money is nice, but you won't do anything with it but buy vodka in very large bottles. Your vacations will be spoiled by an inability to decide where to go or what to do without a client telling you. You'll start suffering those Sunday night sweats where you dread going to sleep because getting up means it's Monday morning and you know the pile of unhappiness on your desk is higher, still, not to mention that your East Coast clients have been at work for three hours and their unhappiness is three hours riper than your West Coast clients.

Most of my bad experiences as a creative director are likely due to some deeper personal issues I'd rather not face, except online and in extended blog posts detailing everything that's wrong with me. It's also important to note that the company you work for -- and its management team -- has a great deal to do with the unhappiness you face yourself. If your management isn't behind you to back you up and, instead, uses the opportunity to support you to instead manifest its own fears concerning the loss of a client because you're an incompetent untalented hack, you're up shit creek and you never even had a paddle. No one told you there was a paddle. There is no paddle.

Yay, team.

LIMIT ON MARRIAGE. CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. Amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: The measure would have no fiscal effect on state or local governments. This is because there would be no change to the manner in which marriages are currently recognized by the state.

After they (they being the people who are for some reason frightened of hoards of married homosexuals storming the gates of heaven, or something) had gathered more than enough signatures (in some cases, paid for) our Attorney General, Jerry Brown, amended the amendment and now it'll read like this on the actual ballot:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME-SEX COUPLES TO MARRY. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. Changes the California Constitution to eliminate the right of same-sex couples to marry in California. Provides that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Fiscal Impact: Over next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments. In the long run, likely little fiscal impact on state and local governments.

There are still some legal battles being bandied about concerning that language, as you might imagine, but no matter how the election turns out, for the time being (and irreversibly) men who love other man and women who love other women can currently run to city hall and get a certificate of marriage and be legally, for now and ever more, married in the state of California.

Now, I suppose I could get on the phone and drum up support and make people aware of the issue and do my part as a good fag to make sure we don't have some legal rights stripped away, but who has the time? And I rather think that everyone already knows where they stand on the issue and those on either side who feel it's important will get into the booth and pull the lever of their own choice -- plus there are larger concerns in this particular election than marriage rights, at least from my perspective.

At any rate, I've decided that the best I can do at this stage is, while it's legal and there's nothing anyone can do about it, to marry as many gay couples as I can. I have therefore become ordained as a minister in the Universal Life Church and, as The Reverend Lance Arthur, I am now able to stand up in front of whatever congregation or gathering of friends in the state of California and pronounce you husband and husband or wife and wife, or partner to partner or whatever phrase you want to use to seal your communion in the vows of holy matrimony.

That's right! I will marry you. Are you going to get married? Looking for someone with credentials and a like-minded attitude about how fucked up things are in general but all he does is whine about it on a blog? I am that man!

I feel like it's my duty as a homosexual to get as many other homosexuals into a marriage as I possibly can. I own my own suit (though lately it fits a might tightly) or I can appear in some expensive jeans and a pair of Prada Sports, as the mood might hit you. I'll say anything you want me to say. Believe me, I don't have any boundaries as far as words are concerned. If you're gearing up for a nude wedding, I'd probably suggest someone a bit younger and more in shape than I, but hell, if that's your preference than I'll be there for you.

I'm freshly ordained (just today, in fact!) and according to everything I read on the web site there's really nothing more to it than that. God'll be there anyway, right? He's everywhere! Or She, as you prefer. And all you really need is your significant other and to be surrounded by the friends, relations and rich relatives who can fill up your registry with all the Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn you can stand.

Here's to gay marriage! Now let's do this sucker!

I don't generally have any more anxiety about a dentist visit than I do about, oh, going to the corner coffee shop or out to a movie. That is to say, I always have some anxiety about doing pretty much anything, besides watching TV or sitting here in front of my trusty, silent computing friend. But given the alternatives, I suppose I'd rather do almost anything than sit in the dentist's chair, as comfortable as it is, and have someone else staring into my open gob while wearing magnifiers as they insert surgical steel instruments and... do things to me.

So I can't stare at her, and since there is no wide screen LCD attached to the ceiling showing me my favorite movie or an Xbox game or something equally diverting, I find that I am simply staring at the blank ceiling. My dentist moved into new offices about a year ago and the new ceilings are extraordinarily dull. In the old offices, they had those ugly black-pitted acoustic tiles lining the ceiling and I could amuse myself looking for patterns in the chaos.

I always assumed that the tiles' seemingly random array of dots wasn't random at all, and that possibly there were four or five different sets of tiles and they were set into the grid at different angles and associations based on nothing at all. Did the installers care about the patterns as much as I did? Did they realize and care that a series of patients would be forced for an hour to do nothing but stare up at them? Were they amusing and surprisingly bright ceiling installers, or perhaps they were chaos statisticians on holiday, and that is what chaos statisticians on holiday do. Then they go away and sit by themselves staring at, I don't know, different kinds of flower stamen while smiling inwardly at their own carefully planned chaotic dental jokes, happy in the knowledge that someone, somewhere is stuck in a chair attempting to figure out their patterned jokes.

The new office ceiling has no such amusements. Like God, it simply is. A blank, off-white canvas with occasional creases in the plaster. Still, my eyes searched its surface for some sort of something to latch onto besides the constantly staring reminder that someone is inside my mouth.

Is there anything more intently personal than allowing someone else to stick things inside you? No, there is not. Plus, in this instance, you can't exactly see what's happening but you can certainly hear it and, occasionally and shockingly, you can feel it.

I'm glad that the outsides of teeth don't feel things. I mean, normally they don't. Heat and cold, of course, but the rubbing of rough metal against them, not so much. Yet they transmit every notch, nick, slip and metallic scrape with more power than a Pete Townsend power chord. So here's another thing to try to ignore. All that noise.

I'm also acutely aware of my tongue, and I wonder if other people are like that. I try to relax it so it's not in the way, and I also try to breathe only through my nose, because only God knows what's lodged in the folds of my throat at any given moment that I might exhale into the face of the woman I am trusting with the open exposed flesh of my mouth.

While I am doing all of this, concentrating so hard on not doing things, I will sometimes return to my body's other many parts and discover that while my attention was diverted to everything above the neck, everything below it was going about the business of living.

I had a hard-on. Don't even ask why. I don't know. I certainly didn't feel turned on. And I instantly hoped that I wasn't, because this would be an extremely expensive and potentially dangerous fetish to have. I also hoped that it wasn't as obvious from outward appearances as it felt from my prone position. What, I thought, would this woman think?

Probably the same things I was thinking, namely "what the hell is going on and why the hell do I have a stiffy in my pants?" Though, you know, she would've thought "...in his pants," or at least one hopes that to be the case, because otherwise...

Anyway, now it's time to shift the concentration downstairs and calm the little guy the fuck down without drawing undo attention to it. It's funny that, even as I travel through my 40s and near a half-century of living on this planet, I can still be undone by my penis.

I can't take a deep calming breath because there are sharp, pointy things near my gums. I can't shift myself out of whatever caused this unintentional erection because I don't know why it's there in the first place. I can't distract myself with the ceiling tile game, because there are no ceiling tiles. Just then, she says, "turn your head toward me," because, I assume, she wants to start digging in even deeper, and as I do so my salvation comes into view.

On the wall, mounted near the spit-sink, are a pair of cardboard boxes that look like facial tissue containers, but instead of facial tissues they hold rubber gloves. There is a box of right gloves and a box of left gloves. And down at the corner of each box, a simple phrase causes my brain to discover someplace else to go besides the land of erotic dentistry.

"50 COUNT BY WEIGHT"

And I think, "the hell?" Count by weight. Count by weight? Count is counting, and weight is weighing. How does one count by weight? And 50 gloves by weight. How much does one glove weigh? And how much does the box weigh? Is there a machine that pours the raw gloves into the box and then it thinks, "I wonder if that's 50. Shit, I should have counted instead of wondering about those ceiling tiles. Hmm, I wonder how much one glove weighs. I bet I can figure out how much 50 gloves weigh, and then weigh the box, and then I'd know if I need to add more gloves!"

As that imagery goes through my imagination, and of course the machine is a kind of Rube Goldberg robot with arms and fingers and a blinking light where its brain should be, my eye falls to another piece of information on the glove boxes, and the simple application of the two letters sends my feverish, eroticized brain into another spin.

"XS"

Extra small gloves? Rubber gloves come in sizes? But they're rubber! They stretch! How much bigger is an XL left rubber glove than an XS left rubber glove. How many sizes are there? Is there a weight differential between an XS left rubber glove versus an XL left rubber glove that would need to be compensated for when weighing a box of 50 to be sure that there are at least 50 in there? Would it matter if there were 51? And why are there left and right gloves? Couldn't you just flip a left over and have a right? I look at the dental assistant's rubber-gloved hands. They look like ordinary rubber gloves. Why the big production? Is there a rubber glove conspiracy going on?

My eyes go back to the glove boxes and I notice something else. The left rubber glove box says "50 COUNT BY WEIGHT" but the right rubber glove box says "100 COUNT!" How do they know? Oh my God, they have to count the 100-count boxes but only weigh the 50-count boxes! There are some people in a factory in China being paid 2¢ an hour to count rubber gloves. But only the 100-count rubber gloves. There's not enough profit in a 50-count box to pay anyone to count them! People are brilliant!

Thankfully, my travels down the path of rubber gloves, robots, Chinese labor and the subtle differences between one's left and one's right hand (though remind me to tell you some day about "The Man With Three Thumbs") has allowed my burgeoning manhood to succumb to boredom and I can once again concentrate on the important matters at hand, like where my tongue is and why they still use that same aquarium screen saver on the computer in the waiting room.

I mean, really, what's that about?