One Eye/Two Eyes/Three Eyes

Did I draw this sweet, innocent picture?! There's not even a band-aid!!

Been very productive drawing this week… probably because Juno’s home so there is someone to tend the Nazgul =D

This is a drawing I started at Ws… Right now, I’m in a DEEP hair obsession I may never crawl out of! Anyway, it’s an illustration that’s been knocking around my head for a while now, of one of my favorite-of-all-time Grimm tales, with three sisters…  In Hungarian, it’s called “One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes” and it’s a pretty screwed up little story with goat innards, freak sisters and everything.

This is a continuation of my ‘Code Brown’ sketch project (a brown paper only book I will fill with pics and then give back to my mom) and a picture I thought even she might enjoy (!) … Heh, in fact, i was just talking to her on Skype yesterday and I told her: Mom, I had time to draw another pic in your book, and I think you might like this one.

-What’s on it? Boys kissing?
-Nope. Three girls.
-And are they…. you know…?
-Nope. They’re not even naked.
-….okay. …is there blood on the picture? Snot? Something dripping out of someone? Is anybody having sex with an octopus?!
-No. There’s… a flower.
-Does it have jagged teeth? Is it eating someone? Is it a poisonous, malignant flower?
-No. It’s just a flower…….

Heh. She knows me too well

All right… gotta hit the sack now.
G’night, moofs.

Kentucky Fried Crack

I drew the boy. I drew the octopus. You provide the story =D

I have no excuse for drawing this picture. I just wanted to spend a day or two around Christmas time drawing a gratuitous pic full of tentacles. It’s a companion piece to my previous tentacle bonanza and a tiny step on the road to me becoming a soft-soft-soft core tentacle pornographist. …..

^-^b
ahem.
In other news:

Don’t ask me why I was spending the second day of Christmas’s eve dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken. I wanted to Christmas with the Colonel, okay?! Maybe my cholesterol was feeling not yet high enough from the insane amount of butter cookies I’ve snarfed down over the last week. Maybe I just really really wanted a Chicken Twister. Whatever, the story starts and ends with J and (–) and me sitting at KFC and I’m eating a Chick-a-Zingy or something like that when I look over and see the perfect condiment to my dinner. Not.

…. It was a big, sweaty, hairy ass-crack (!!)

Why am I sharing this? Well, because I’m cruel and I was disturbed so now YOU, gentle reader, have to be disturbed. Aforementioned crack belonged to a young man. He was at a table with two of his friends… and… you know, this phenomenon? Of people buying pants wayyyy too low and wayyyy too tight for them? And tight pants are nice, but then they sit down at a table where their backside is fully visible to the entire restaurant/bar/public establishment! Well, when you’re lucky, it’s a cute girl wearing a tasteful thong, but when you’re NOT lucky, it’s someone other than a cute girl and their ass is menacing out at you like Marie Antoinette’s clea-vage.

0_0

You know, I used to work with a girl who always wore pants so low, I saw her thong every day. Every day! I mean, it was cool, (I’m not talking just the top strap, but the whole shebang, people… so, basically, her whole butt, whenever she bent over) and because I’m a bit of a dirty dog, I always looked, but after a while, I thought… wait a minute. Am I obligated to say something?

But whatever would I say?

-::cough:: I can see your butt. Like… ALL of it.

And I really wondered! Does she not FEEL the air on her rear? Maybe she knows full well, but she doesn’t care? Maybe she thinks it’s provocative? Is she trying to brighten someone’s day?

In the case of my coworker, I didn’t mind,  but this guy at KFC was really getting me down. We’re in Munich so his name was probably Hans. Maybe Fritz. Possible even Heinz-Martin. And his ass was hairy. Super hairy. And once I looked, there was no going back, I wanted to look somewhere else, to be considerate, but all I could think was to slow down my vehicle, rubber necking at the twisted, dead bodies, the flaming wreckage: Officer, what’s happened here? Is everything okay?

People, if you wear really low, tight pants, please be careful! You never know when some moof is sitting behind you trying to finish a sandwich from KFC….!

Wishing you a warm butt for the rest of the holidays and I’m off.

Messenger

Star music - Don't shoot the messenger.

I started this blog basically a year ago. The point was to have a place to put up drawings and writings that I haven’t OCD-ed to death and edited the frig out of.

Ie., sometimes they sucked. Make that probably a lot of times.

Pictures really are like one night stands. At three in the morning, it is such a fucking great idea! Go go go! Come come come! If you’re lucky, even the next morning, it is still not awful. You can look your pic in the face and smile sheepishly. Not quite the fireworks of three in the morning, but no shame either. A week later, you run into your picture by the coffee machine and avert your eyes thinking: Sheez. Your boobs look like rotten pears. Should NOT have tossed my hotdog down that hallway.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. (But maybe other people dislike their pictures too once they’re done with them?) At any rate, hating your picture the next day is, I think, part of the growth process. Documenting the suck-suck is also a part of the growth process. Hence the blog!

“I try to be a truthful artist and I try to show a level of courage. I enjoy that. I’m a messenger.” ~ Jeff Koons

Is the Illu Friday quote for the week. It fits, I think. And here, at the end of the year are a few people I’d like to thank for their stone cold awesomeness and for lending me some courage:

Painblotch is basically the reason I’m doing anything artistic right now. No. Really. Before I knew her, I was drawing stick-figures in a puddle of my own misery, naked, shivering, snorting peanut butter. Paintblotch straightened me out. This girl has such a gentle,  eerie way with images, backed up with enviable technique and a frightening command of all sorts of mysterious mediums. Graphite, ink, oil, digital–they are her bitch. She has introduced me to soooo much it’s dizzying, and is also the reason I started this blog! Check hers out here =) [Ooh, and we've started our parka session, where I sit for her in nothing but parka and panties, p + p, when I wanted so much for somebody [slavic male someone] to sit for me in nothing but a parka! sob sob, but see, that’s Paintblotch, always putting me that much closer to my dreams! ;p]

W. is a Munich artist I met earlier this year–he features as a regular cast member here on the ‘Couch’. I started out as his grotesquely pregnant gaybo model late last winter; now we are just super friends. W makes art like other people breathe: I think it is a body process for him. His art is where he moves, it’s where he dances. You need to be brave to look at it, it is not always ‘pretty’–but it is always rich, surprising and moving its ass!!  Thanks W for being my spirit brother!

On the writing front: Joseph Danaghie does not post much on his blog–sadly! I wish it included more writings, but if you  live in the Munich area, he’s started an event here I enjoy very much called Anti-Slam. We come together and read/discuss our writing in a friendly environment where nobody is allowed to throw projectiles larger than a goose’s egg. Quiche and thermoses of tea accompany such readings. You can keep an eye on the Slam process here, or bug Joseph personally to post more of his melodious and explosive writing.

And then, artist I do not know personally but love so much: Rod Luff, your art is so beautiful, it makes me fucking ache. I am already in a till-death-cleaves-us-asunder relationship, but were I not, I swear I’d hop on a plane to Sydney tomorrow on Christmas Eve and prowl around your house until you either called the cops or said ‘fine, crazy stalker thingie, you. Fine. Let’s get married.’

To the people above: Thanks for all the inspiration, guidance and friendship you’ve given me in 2011. I love you guys and I wish you all the sugar, power and women your art can bring you.

[First you get the sugar...
then you get the power....
then you get the wiii-men....]

And then thanks reading moofies, for wading through my silly rants, looking at my girly boys and leaving your love. Half of art/writing is the need to drain it out, but the other half is the wish to connect to someone, you guys. ^-^

I wish you a holiday season full of crisp bacon wrapped around things.

Like figs.
And scallops.
And the one you love.

Last but not least, thanks to the Schopenfags who make every day here in Munich full of ridiculousness: Uncle Fail, Protestant extraordinaire; Juno, the light of my life; and (–), the mini light of my life.

Wet kisses and a beautiful Christmas Eve to all of you.

[PS: This post was originally scheduled to be called 'Messenger - My Socialist Pussy', but I heard that if you use 'Pussy' in the title of your Christmas blog-post, baby Jesus won't find your house when he's bringing the presents... 0_o
...Didn't have the guts to see if that's true....]

Touch This!

Touch This - Go ahead, pet me, I can take it. Click to see the nubbles!!

Now since my mom is one of my drawing buddies, a lot of times I show her my pics and she does this one thing as soon as she sees them that makes me shit bricks. She TOUCHES them. She’ll take the flat of her hand and draw it down the picture appreciatively while I yawp out: Nooooooooo! Don’t TOUCH it, no!

But its so NICE, she says. Don’t you just want to touch it?

The thing is, basically everything I draw is with graphite and then when you touch, there’s finger oils and smearing and badness going down. But I was at Ws today (drawing, not modeling) and I was struck that his art looks like its meant to be touched. This has impressed me before, but today, something drove it home. His sketchbooks stick together; one half of the image will often leave a ghost print on the other side of the page. He’ll take a stick , or a spackle thingie and start scraping lines and dots, hack into the rich layer of paint or oil pastel he has laid down. His work is not dainty. It has STRUCTURE. It screams: Touch this. No, really! Go ahead! I can take it.

So I was inspired. I also laid down the oil pastel thickly. I also scraped lines into it. I smeared and globbed on acrylic. On the way home, I put in a protective layer of paper, but later I took it out, thinking: Fuck it! Let the pages stick together! And when my mom sees this picture, I’ll say. Go ahead. TOUCH THIS!

By the way, happy winter people. It really is winter here. The other day, I was on the road with (–) and it was snowing, and for the first time in his life, snow blew into his little Nazgul face. (Can you imagine?! The sensation of snow blowing in your face for the very first time?!) Well, he seemed to think it was pretty shitty.

“Yes, sweetie.” I told him while he grimaced. “This is called ‘being cold.’ It’s bullshit, huh?”

Cold = bullshit.

So to combat the cold, my touchable picture features a sun-dappled field. I don’t know why, but this field reminds me of France. Maybe it’s the two people who remind me of France. Anyway, here’s a sunny field with two naked people chilling, which is what I want to be doing, chilling in the sun with nudoes, not freezing my ass off in Munich, but whatever.

Keep your balls warm moofies; if you don’t keep them warm, they’ll freeze off and litter the streets and some squirrel will run over, think it’s a frozen acorn left over from summer and eat it and die. Do you want that squirrel’s blood on your hands?!? 0_0

Shizumu

shizumu - to sink

Normally, I don’t do the whole big head/little body type of drawing, but I was inspired for this post by little (–), who also has a big head, and little body, and almond shaped eyes and quizzical eyebrows and nut brown hair and baby doll lips =D

This is a picture of him as a girl, getting attacked by jellyfish. Of course, that would never happen in real life, because I would massacre the jellyfish like a pterodactyl to protect my DNA.

In other news, there is no news. …Have a good week, moofies ^-^

Books/Pics/X-mas

So I went Christmas shopping today…. It was with a good friend, and that was fun, but pawing through the meat crush was still every bit as traumatizing as I expected.  I escaped to W’s afterwards, for some drawing…

This page of my sketchbook is dedicated to the unholy beauty of mr. andrej pejic.

Paintblotch randomly sent me links the other day…. and then the drawing of him had to happen. Hand battle also continues as you can see.

And then, since this blog is supposed to also be about books, and I have read a few good ones lately, here’s a little selection, if you’re looking for something tasty to read : )

Futurama – The Windup Girl  by Paolo Gacipalupi

Highly recommend having a Thai restaurant all picked out if you read this book, because once you’re finished, you’re going to need one. Windup made me hungry. Pretty much every scene is drenched in the scent of pad thai; telapia gently sizzling while knees are getting clubbed and heads bashed in… Set in a futuristic Thailand after bio-engineering gone rogue has wiped out major portions of our food source, Windup follows the adventures of Anderson Lake, a so-called calorie man who’s after two things: the secret of a delicious new engineered fruit… and a windup girl, one of the beautiful Japanese-engineered humans who may or may not have a soul. Read with a side of mango ice-cream or green curry.

Graphic Novel – Habibi  by Craig Thompson

There is a very special and toasty section in Hell reserved especially for people who didn’t like Thompson’s Habibi… and I don’t want to be in it screaming! Let me start by saying that Thompson is a graphic novel god, and that art-wise, Habibi is amazing. Each and every page is a joy to look at and absolutely flawless. The base story of Habibi is a touching one and it examines some important questions about family and love. Still, and this is a carry-over issue from Thompson’s earlier work ‘Blankets’, albeit in a much more drastic form: the author seems to have some serious hang-ups about sexual desire vis-a-vis religion (and oh, just sexual desire in general). I don’t want to give spoilers, but you’ll know the scene when you get to it. It’s the scene where the room gets super-ass quiet and in your head you hear only a tiny voice whisper: Really? Is that the ONLY solution to this problem? Really?! (You’re curious, aren’t you? All I can say is get it and read it now!!)

Neo-Classic – Why Aren’t You Smiling? by Alvin Orloff

Did you grow up in the 70s? I didn’t. But after I read ‘Smiling’, I feel like I did. I have this strange obsession for Alvin Orloff, not quite of the magnitude of my Bruce Benderson obsession, but every bit as creepy. It’s because he’s a great, funny writer and I suspect we have the same taste in men. If you grew up in the 70s, this book’ll inject you with some nostalgia, I’m sure. If you didn’t, for 170+ pages you’re going to breathe, eat, hear, smell and taste the 70s in suburban America, in all its crazyass glory. (Oh and there’s a lot of cute boy-crushes in this book. Need I say more to recommend it?)

Classic-Classic – Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Doesn’t Giovanni’s room sound like an awesome place to hang out? ‘Hey guys… let’s go drink some beers in Giovanni’s room!’ I suppose awesome though is in the eye of the beholder… David is a young American loafing around in Paris who just proposed to his American girlfriend. While she’s trucking around Spain trying to soul-search out if she wants to marry him or not, David meets a young Italian bartender named Giovanni and Giovanni’s room becomes the moldering place where he slowly disembowels everything he thinks he loves and believes in. I won’t call this novel ‘intense’; literally every review blurb on the cover has already done that for me.. I’ll just say its a beautiful, introspective work on the nature of love and sexual confusion with the kind of prose people sadly don’t seem to be writing anymore.

All right.

Getting close to Christmas, moofs…. I hope you all warm and sane times with lots of cookies ^-^b

Seperation

colored paper, graphite and tiny bit of acrylic (Separation - song: In the Air) Click on picture to activate awesome sprinkles.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it. ~ Hanns Eisler

So, I think this is the nicest drawing I’ve ever done. Of course my luck, it’s on a freakin’ page where I had another, totally random and unrelated drawing of a cute kitten. I started drawing around the cat and then…. And it is cute and vaguely reminding me of (–). I guess I could’ve shopped it out… but its big wet eyes said: Please! Please don’t shop me awaaaayyyy. So he stays. The IF prompt is ‘Separation’, and that is a word that gets my brain going much easier than ‘Brigade’. I had a few hours today after I’d translated Squid Girl and wiped my kid’s bum to throw a drawing down the hatch.

Barn owl inspired by a photo of one of my Flickr friends. I really love barn owls… they have such interesting faces… (Does a bird have a face? Whatever… ). Their faces are kind of humanoid; one part benevolent, and one part eerie. (I think it’s the combination of the mask-like quality of the white heartshape and the pupil-less, ultra-black eyes….) At any rate, there is something very beautiful and disturbing to me about a barn-owl’s face, which is why I wanted to draw one.

And then tomorrow! Wish us luck… We will do battle with an enormous dead turkey and fresh herbs to make Fangsgiving dinner for our peoples.

Fangsgiving Menu at Casa Schopenfag:

Pumpkin soup

Roast turkey

Potatoes with gravy

Salad with pan-seared mushrooms

Cornbread

Stuffing with dried cranberries and sausage

Creamy Yambake (Courtesy of Justin, thank you!! =D)

Delicious pies (Courtesy of Paintblotch, thank you!! <3333)

Booze

And there will be one baby Nazgul milling amongst the guests, sinking his five fangs into them. (He now has five (5!) baby teeth out and one more about to come….) Anyway, I hope the neighbors don’t call the cops again on us like they did last year, and I wish you guys all a great weekend =)

Youch, Yaoi!

A short lesson.

This is NOT yaoi - this is yuri (girl (love) study). Brown paper, acrylic, coffee, W, Amy Winehouse

Yaoi is frustrating.
Yaoi is ridiculous.
Yaoi is stupid and erotic.

Yaoi is the stuff I translate weekly to make some extra moolah. I just translated an episode of it today. It’s not gay. Even if it is Japanese cartoons/animated shows depicting idealized homoromantic relationships between beautiful men. (God, I love the word ‘homoromantic’. I wish there were more opportunities to use it in every day life. This apple is so juicy and homoromantic.) Did I mention yaoi’s not gay? Insofar as it is not produced to make a gay man horny or wistful. (That would be bara, or geikomi, gay comics.) Yaoi is made for fujoshi. I know, all these vocab words!  (Don’t worry, you won’t be tested later!) What is a fujoshi? Well, she is a woman who enjoys looking at yaoi. Why a fujoshi would enjoy watching the romantic exploits of two or more men in the world who’s cocks will never point towards her is beyond me.

Just because I am a fujoshi does not mean that I understand their erratic, delicate ways.

Y’all know that poem by Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn?

…Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss….

Yup, he was writing about a lot of things, and one of them was yaoi. How’s that for writing poetry before your time?? This is a genre entirely devoted to unrequited love, to  never reaching satisfaction, to (maybe) kissing, but never ever saying ‘I love you’.  Ya. O. I.

Japanese acronym for YAma nashi, Ochi nashi–Imi nashi.
Climax–none. Plot–zilch. Meaning–zero.

(Some people say the term comes from Yamete, oshiri ga itai! -Stop, my ass hurts!… But I don’t think so.)

Stock yaoi has two stock characters yearn the fuck out of each other, sometimes, they even fuck each other, but nothing ever gets resolved. One of these stock characters is the seme, from the Japanese verb ‘semeru’ (to give it in the ass). The seme looks like a handsome woman with short hair and very broad shoulders. Then there is the uke, from the Japanese verb ‘ukeru’ (to receive in the ass). The uke looks like a cute, big eyed girl with longish short hair and broad shoulders. There are a lot of farcical Shakespearean misunderstandings in yaoi and a lot of Dickensian coincidences, generally resolved with tender makeup sex that we never get to see. Butt sex with the lights off. In the missionary position. Seme on top, of course!! If you have a sexually poor imagination, such as YT, this can get extremely frustrating. You find yourself drawing diagrams later for closure.

Some consider the term ‘yaoi’ to have become a bit too catch-all–too westernized–even tongue in cheek. So in Japan, the genre is now called Boy’s Love.  Don’t worry though; it doesn’t actually feature love between boys. This is because there are no pedophiles in Japan. That’s right. Not even one.

Sometimes, my boy’s love show, called ‘The Only One in the World’ does get me down. Ritsu Onodera is an adorable 25 year old boyyyyy who longs to make it on his own in the publishing industry. Wanting to step out of his successful father’s shadow, he quits the literature business and goes into girls comic publishing instead, and who should he discover his boss to be, that fateful first day? Well, the editor-in-chief at Marukawa Publishing is none other than the handsome senior who broke Ritsu’s heart almost a decade ago, in high-school. Ritsu had just confessed his love to Takano after they’d had sex when Takano got an unfortunate throat cramp. Interpreting his spasmodic cough as a laugh, Ritsu ran mortified from his arms (and his room, and their school), only to find himself as Takano’s underling almost ten years later!

Spoiler: The spark is still there.

And if all that heat passing between their finger tips while they hand each other storyboards and manuscripts wasn’t bad enough, Ritsu discovers that his new boss and old lover is also… his new neighbor! Sweet. That means even more opportunities to slip and fall on Takano’s dick and then run away the next day when he asks about Ritsu’s feelings. I swear, half of the dialogue is so:

Takano: Onodera. I love you. How do you feel about me?
Ritsu: Look at that sweet kitty!
Takano: Do you love me, or just my body?
Ritsu: Boy, you know what  I do love? Cheese! It’s so creamy.
Takano: Onodera, will I ever be anything but a hard cock to you?
Ritsu: Mr. Takano, did you say something?
Moof: AHHGHGHGHGHG I can’t take it anymore!!!
[Apparently, this is the point where Takano can't either. ]
Ritsu: Mr. Takano, stop that! Mr. Takano, what are you doing?!
Have you gone out of your mind?! I’m a man and you’re a man!!
Moof: Boys, can you at least keep the lights on this time? Pleeeeez?
Takano: [turns light off]
Moof: sigggghghghhhhhhh

Smash cut to waking up in bed with the birds twittering outside the window and the uke looking all embarrassed and blushy, because despite his coy lazer being on hell yeah, the seme’s managed to get him on the tip of his dick. Again.

Takano: Good morning, Ritsu. Do you love me now?
Moof: ……………………………………………….
Youch yaoi.

Sank yuu!

It was not easy, the day you were born. A moleskine sketch I'm not sure about...

You know, I’ve read so many books over the course of my life, it’s sick– I’ve written so much about books, in emails, in letters, in diaries, here on this blog, it’s insane. When it’s come to dropping letters, I’ve really let it rain, so how unbelievable it is one day to  read something someone had written about a book I’ve written:

….and so this is a story powered by yearning. Though the book describes itself as a genderqueer tale, it shares with yaoi (boy love manga) a searing energy of unrequited love, a passion that unfulfilled is more gripping to readers than the actual coupling of characters could ever be.

….This is a story slick, professional comic art would ruin. Merey’s art, if more amateur, better parallels the life experiments of the high school characters in its grips….

(bold added by me) … It’s like… M-M-Merey’s…. art?  I have ART?!?

You can read the full review here if you’re interested and thank you to Cathy Camper for a nice, thoughtful review!

And now, moving forward. Being in Berlin and talking to Joseph really reconfirmed that I have to stop drinking, frequenting brothels, retire my crack pipe and get my life together… No, what am I saying, I’ve got to stop being a big, quavering pussy and finish my second (I guess technically my third, whatever) book and then find the courage to show it to someone. But I’m afraid.

It’s not that I think it’s badly written… but I just hate imposing on the reader and I feel like this may be one of those books. That impose. I think I might be stretching a reader’s patience too far with it–on the other hand, I feel the story can’t be told any other way.

Oh well, I’ll get it done first–focus of my night, to get back on that.
Hope you’re well, moofies!

Freak Like Me

Almost Perfect – A (sort of) Book Review

I got this book ‘Almost Perfect’ in the mail today from German Amazon and the first thing I did was tear off the cardboard fur-coat and start tearing right into it. I’d ordered it for two reasons. 1. It has a beautiful cover. No, it’s like really, this cover was designed to catch MY eye– in my mouth-fixation stage, it is a female mouth–crisp, on white. smeared lipstick and reason 2.  the author of this book sounds like a real sweetheart <3 Superficial reasons, I know, but maybe apropos to a story about covers hiding more than meets the eye…

So I order, it arrives, and I had another session with W this afternoon. And there I was in his apartment, sitting naked on a piano stool in his room, lactating like a motherfucker, milk pooling on the ground while he painted me (long story about the lactation,  let’s skip it for now*), drinking bitter, good coffee out of a yellow cup and reading ‘Almost Perfect’. Some kind of jazz was on in the background and the book kept cracking me up. What’s so funny? W would ask. It was hard to explain.

I wanted to tell him, W, I’m really digging this book. I’m feeling it very much. And I was. I am. It’s about a snooze boy who’s world gets rocked when he finds out that the girl he’s set his heart on is actually packing heat. What’s a snooze boy? Oh, you know, one of those boys  from small, American towns, generally nice, into chasing a ball of some sort and you can’t imagine ever falling in love with one of them. They’re another species. No, from another planet. Exactly what’s fascinating for me about this book–it had the power to make me imagine  falling in love with a snooze boy.

Sage is a new girl at Logan’s school and I swear, the first time Logan describes her walking into his lab, I felt such a kinship for her. No, it was more. It was like, I was her. Big ego, yes? I’m sorry, that’s what I do when I read, I identify with the characters, and ‘Perfect’ only has two major ones, so I gotta be a him or a the girl who walks in the room looking crazy, talking a little too loud, being one of the guys. She’s not super pretty, but something about her gets under your skin and I thought Fuck, I wear fake fur! Torn jeans! Big boots! Crazy dresses! I have fantasized about cutting off my hateful tits too many times to count!

My ass was still on Ws piano stool getting a cramp when I got to the point where Logan kisses Sage for the first time. It’s a nice kiss. It’s a kiss he enjoys. And then, in a fit of guilt, she tells him why she’s been acting so strange around him, why her parents are so protective and secretive of her: Sage is a boy living as a girl. Or rather a girl who does not want to live as a boy. As soon as she is out from under her parents’ control, she will get a sex change operation and be a fully-functioning female.

Logan flips! He almost hits her! He lurches out into the streets! He vomits with disgust! His biggest fear is not ‘oh, how will it work with this girl I’ve fallen in love with… what now?’ His biggest and most immediate fear is… ‘holy cow, I kissed a boy and I liked it–even though she passes completely as, and considers herself, a girl. Even though nobody knows at school.. but if someone finds out… they’ll think I’m GAY!’

And when I read that part, I laughed out loud.

W: What are you laughing about?

This snoozey dude! I wanted to yell at W. I wanted to howl ‘What a freak!’ And the moment I thought that Logan was a freak, I realized ‘Perfect’ is great no matter what you are. If you’re a snooze boy. Or if you’re a freak. Because you will judge the other side and feel how it feels. I thought, what kind of backwards ass boy gives a shit about kissing another boy (especially if she looks completely like a girl?)… what are you living in? The sixties? On another planet? It made me think I’d never really met anyone like Logan before–I’d never been to the middle of the United States! I don’t mingle with people from super small towns. I have no idea what it’s like to be someone like him; to be afraid of these things because I am one of those degenerates Logan claims to have only seen on talk-shows before he met Sage.

But I like him still, that’s the perfection of ‘Perfect’. He’s considerate, he can be lovable. He’s a moody douche sometimes, but he cracks me up with his little one-liners.

“There she was, standing like a root-beer stand in the desert.”

“So you’re Logan,” he said eventually. He said it like being Logan was some sort of dark perversion.”

And this book makes me wonder. I wondered what is it like to be someone like Logan? To never consider your sex? To not consider it like you don’t consider the sky, or you don’t consider gravity? To just accept it? I guess it’s like being white, I never question that. But what can it feel like to feel at home in your body? To know this is who you are, and be comfortable with it? I wonder what it is like to be so terrified to kiss someone of your same sex? To not want to do it any more than you would want to taste shit?  I am thinking the opposite of everything he is thinking as he slowly comes to terms with why Sage needs to live the way she does, realizing that there are other ways to think and feel and be than himself. Like I need to keep peeking into these windows and remind myself of all those other ways to think and see and feel.

Heads. Tails. But the coin is the same.
(And don’t take my word, make up your own mind…. You can get this great book here!)

[*And now for a story about lactation. This section not for the faint of heart. I had my reading in Berlin last night (!!) and that meant one full day away from the baby Nazgul. By morning this morning, my rack was ready to burst. Of course that's when someone had to sneak a pipe-bomb on our plane or some such horseshit and there I was at Shithole Airport with increasingly aching, granite tits of death. 'Just milk yourself' J suggested helpfully on my phone. Sure! Milk yourself! Why not? Where to? The handicapped bathroom? Except there was always a line! What if someone got behind me and I spent ten minutes in there going fucking Heidi the milkmaid on myself? They'd want to lynch the non-handicapped girl when she got out, let's just say that. But the hurt was getting bad. I wondered if boobs can POP.  So I eased into one of the stalls in the fem. bathroom. Lots of females outside, tapping their toes, but I'll take my time here. Lift up my shirt and face the toilet, like a little kid about to whizz thinking

Why?

Why? Is this happening to me?

Do you think the milk was obedient and went into the toilet bowl? Fuck that. It went EVERYWHERE. It was streaming off the walls. It was pooling on the ground. It was getting on my shoes. It was getting on my nerves. Why me? In the middle of this, the loudspeaker squawks. They’ve finally removed whatever tero-item from our aircraft and it is boarding. Tout de suite! French for move your ass! Chop-chop! Right now! Two hour delays so we’ve got to step on it! I stuff my aching boobs into my shirt. I rip off paper and try, so impotently, to wipe down everything. Finally in desperation, I just toss an armful of toilet paper on the ground. I tear out of the stall, blushing like a teenager after a public WC wank gone horribly horribly wrong. Wash my hands. Women shaking their heads. Cluck. Cluck. Cluck. Just look at this stall.
Oh, suck me ladies.
Just catch your flight.
It’s done, all right, but
Boobs, man. Sometimes, they turn on you just like that.