It’s humid as fuck, and what’s worse, it’s humid as fuck at NIGHT. I am in bed and lying extremely still with minimal clothing on, angled directly at my A/C unit that blew cold air last summer but seemingly has forgotten how to do that this summer. About 4.2% of things went right today and the rest did not. The best thing about today is that Lana Del Rey is hitting, mostly because listening to Lana while you’re feeling moody is one of the most validating experiences ever.
I figured that writing a few little thoughts down might help distract, flush out, refresh, and so on. And here I go!
I just rearranged my room, and by that I mean I tossed out random shit that I have kept in my possession since my dorm room days for no reason other than ‘what if I need this one day?’ I had to get real in that I really, really, did not need my laminated name tag from a random college event in 2016. Objects of this nature (i.e. a 95%-used bottle of Neosporin, a shirt that I started hating 4 years ago that has lived under my bed, a toiletries bag that has dried toothpaste all over it and I also haven’t used in 4 years) should be tossed out, typically. I’m bad at that.
I also moved my dresser to where my shelving unit was, and moved my shelving unit to where my dresser was. Isn’t that revelatory? Nobody is doing it quite like me.
On my dresser, which btw is in a new place (it’s actually where my shelving unit used to be!), there’s a Calvin Klein package in which new underwear came in. On the box, there is a man who was genetically blessed with Looking Good in the Body, and I’m staring at it because his body Looks Good and he is only wearing underwear for Christ’s sake.
Every gay man knows the whole narrative of lingering in the underwear aisle at the Clothing Store™, and I absolutely did the same thing. I would be 11 years old in Target, pretending to be fascinated by some product or good just off to the distance, behind the underwear rack, while my eyes would instead be fixated on the bulges of Hanes, proud of myself (happy pride) because I’d figured out how to stealthily stare at dick (outlines) in Target.
Sidenote: ‘Staring at Dick in Target’ is kind of a fire name for a memoir.
Sidenote: Mom you don’t have to keep reading this!
But that is not all I would do. In fact, while I did that in Targets, Walmarts, and other places of business, I am remembering something else I’d do at Barnes & Noble. And no, it wasn’t reading softcore-y novels in the Love aisle. My little gay ass would go find anatomy books. Books about the human body. Science books about our fleshy corporeal vessels. And I would go to the back of the book, because I quickly came to know that in the back of these books would be diagrams of things like the endocrine system, and within that the reproductive system, and within that the male body, with all of its dick and dick-adjacent parts. On those pages, my eyes would bore a hole through the paper, thinking about sex before I’d first known about porn, getting all up in the science of it all. I thought I was being covert, that it was essential to be covert.
There I was Staring at Anatomical Dick in Barnes & Noble… It’s objectively sad that I was so cripplingly self-aware of my own attraction to men that I’d created this pretend passion for science, just so I could look at the cross-section of a shaft for 20 seconds every time I was at a book store (once a season, maybe). I’m sorry, though, because that’s also objectively FUCKING HILARIOUS. Karla you were soooooo crazy for that… Perhaps Michael will be hearing about this in Zoom therapy tomorrow evening. I honestly think he would be interested in that because I really wonder if a client of his has ever 1) done that and 2) told him about it. I am literally on the brink of becoming his most interesting and unique client…
Okay, I think my little trick worked. The A/C is sort of working, I feel like I exercised my brain past that lil rough spot, and I’ve successfully unearthed some weird behavior I engaged in as a youth. Thank you, as always, for reading. <3
staring at the bulge on my dresser
Did you get a 3 pack of Cavin Klein underwear at TJ Mack? Was it originally $30 and when you got to the counter they told you it was half off so actually only $15? And have you ever heard of a better deal than that?