Another One Bites The Dust

I suppose I should consider myself lucky that lately I'm only moved to write a new post here every two or three months; in the old days - say, this time last year - I could have put nearly as much content on here as I do on the Pop Culture Institute and still not said enough in enough different ways about how much I hate myself. Hell, I didn't even post here after Pride Day; under normal circumstances, those three hours are by far the most stressful of my entire year. Usually I rush home after the parade and throw myself into a shame spiral so powerful it disrupts international shipping.

This year, of course, things went well at Pride Day; I stayed for the better part of six hours and came home more or less content. If I could have been certain that my request would offend whomever received it into retirement (or some kind of cardiac event) I'd have applied to the Vatican to have Pride Day 2008 designated a miracle.

I attribute this turnaround to my recently adopted policy of giving up. I have simply given up on men; having done that - and more importantly, having done it sincerely - suddenly the single worst thing in my life has simply vaporized. The fear of meeting someone and having to show them my disgusting body has overshadowed my every social interaction since that day in 1990 when I crossed the magic gay threshold back from being underweight (and therefore attractive) to normal weight (and therefore a disgusting troll who has no right to live). With each pound I've added since then I've added the equivalent weight of self-loathing to match, simply to save any gay men I might potentially meet the time and hassle of doing it themselves. Giving up on meeting someone, giving up on feeling worthy of love, giving up on finding that most intimate of relationships has simply liberated me; in fact, it's helped me give up on the delusion that such things are possible for me.

Until this evening, that is. This evening I was doodling around on Facebook, having completed a truly heroic passel of posts on PCI, when up popped that pesky little window, with a chat request from someone new. Since these conversations normally go fairly well (or well enough, anyway - the last one resulted in a marriage proposal from Taiwan, which I managed to deflect without setting off an international incident) I blundered into this one with every good intention; this evening, I wanted to make a new friend. What I didn't realize (until it was too late) was that my new correspondent was from Vancouver.

My first clue that it wasn't going to end well - aside from the fact that he was from Vancouver - should have been in the chat I was receiving back; even allowing for the fact that not everyone has a) the keyboard proficiency of Billy Joel and b) the ability to spell even one syllable words correctly, Thomas* was trouble from the start. I can only assume he was drunk off his ass, which is the only reason I can think of why a person whose only language is English couldn't spell words like "that" or "why" or even "or"; homonyms like here/hear and the deadly combination of there/their/they're I can cut someone slack over, especially since their correct meaning is encoded contextually. Honestly, though, if you routinely spell "or" as "ur" then you have a major learning disability and maybe a written medium like the Internet isn't for you. Especially when there's a spell check built right into the program!

My second clue should have been when he kept stating over and over that he "wasn't a bar star" even though a) he lives in the heart of the gay ghetto, and b) he made a point of saying several times how he used to be a model; he also made a point of telling me again and again that he wasn't into playing games. All the while - that's right - playing games. Methinks the pretty boy doth protest too much...

So, he starts pressuring me to make a date with him; I tell him, quite honestly, that he is far too attractive for me, that I'm not interested, that I'm unable to enter the city's gay neighbourhood without being chased, Lord of the Flies-like, by roving gangs of feral twinks (who, in Vancouver at least, are as dangerous as raccoons although nowhere near as smart). Honestly, I could walk the entire length of the longest street in Kabul and be safer than I am on any single block of Davie Street. Still, he keeps pushing me for information - where do I live, when's my day off, what day can we meet; eventually I lay it all out on the line for him, tell him what my expectations for a possible meeting are, set my ground rules... In other words, I was both blunt and honest; that was probably where I made my biggest mistake.

That's also when he starts telling me I'm being presumptuous (a word, by the way, he spells perfectly - he can't spell "or" but he can spell "presumptuous" - which must make him some kind of idiot but no kind of savant) for thinking he was trying to make a date with me. Even though he'd already said "I want to make a date with you". (Actually, what he typed was " ii wan tto makea datte with yoou" - seriously folks, spunk will ruin a keyboard.)

In a flash I unfriended him and blocked him from having any future access to my account. I stopped short of messaging all of our friends in common, though, as that would have only made matters worse; by that point I just wanted him (not to mention our entire interaction) to not just go away but to have never happened in the first place.

So why do I feel so bad? Clearly I have been played by a player; admittedly, a player who told me about eight times that he thought I was hot - an idea which is so laughable that laughing at it would just be rubbing it in. He and I both know that I cannot be hot because I am fat - not straight fat mind you, I'm straight burly, but gay fat, meaning not twenty pounds underweight; the idea that I would ever meet him only crossed my mind because given up on men or not, I'm gagging for cock. I guess I thought I could have him over, get what I wanted from him, and then scare him off once he started to pressure me for more; instead I did the usual thing I do and scared him off first, before I even got to suck him off.

In the future I must keep telling myself: a hot guy who says he likes you is only going to come over, slip you a roofie, and boost all your swag; I mean, after all, if I can get all the way to the age of 38 without having spoken in person to more than a dozen really hot gay guys in my life, what are the chances more hotties (rather than less) are going to want to talk to me now that I've turned my gruesome twosome of fat and ugly into the troll trifecta of old, fat, and ugly?

*Not his real name, natch!