DOES IT GET BETTER?

(c) Breeze Vincinz

 

This is going to be my entry into the "It Does Get Better Campaign", despite the fact it might be over with by the time this gets published. Nevertheless, I still wanted to say a little something about gay teen suicides and speak to those teenagers who are questioning their sexuality and are having such a hard time coping with their peers during this time.

I was talking about the "It Does Get Better Campaign" with a friend of mine. I was thinking about the idea of "it getting better". Honestly, I guess I question the idea of it getting "better" and is it a level of delusion that we want to promote. In one aspect I think we definitely should tell teenagers, "You know what, you're a teenager; the world is kind of microscopic at this point. But it is bigger, and it is better." I know when I was a teenager, when I was 15 or 16, my world was just High School and I didn't think anything existed outside of it. My thought was that the people who were fucking with me at 15 or 16 were always going to exist, they were always going to fuck with me and I was never going to get out of that situation. And truth of the matter is, I think this should be a campaign of, "Dude, once you graduate, seriously, you never have to see those fools… ever again in your entire life. " I can tell you, honestly, I am 39 years old, I have not seen those people since I graduated. You hear me? You never have to see them, ever again. I think that alone should give you some inspiration to keep going because once you graduate it's a done deal. So just get through the next couple of years.

ASTROLOGY AND THE SINGLE MAN

(c) Breeze Vincinz

Once upon a time I befriended a clairvoyant. And like all of my relationships, platonic or romantic, its formation was fierce, quick and alcohol laced (well on my part at least, he was a teetotaler). I haven’t spoken to my teetotaler clairvoyant friend in quite some time but he popped up in my head today; the end of what I imagine to have been an extended patch of bad times for the past week or so. My weight loss has plateaued, I got stood up on Valentine’s Day (fuck you Joey!), though there have been a ton of “better” I have unwittingly skidded into the “worse” in the dysfunctional marriage between me and my job, and to top it off I was witness to three, yes THREE (!), separate fights on the bus ride from work… one that I unfortunately was a part of when a zaftig and disheveled young woman loudly proclaimed that I was trying to steal her bag because I, dressed in a turtleneck, jeans, boots, leather jacket and laptop bag, looked homeless and was trying to steal her purse. I blame it on my lack of sleep lately as well as just the accumulation of bullshit going on but I very ashamedly have to admit that… well… I read her for filth. I read her from chimpan-A to chimpan-Z. I called her everything but a child of God. It also didn’t help that this woman, who quite frankly looked like a tousled understudy for the movie “Precious”, was actually gathering sympathy from people on the bus while she pined on in the most dramatic of tones that could have rivaled Loretta Divine in “Colored Girls” about how “Somebody almost walked off wid alla my stuff!” All of a sudden I was the male antagonist in every Black female empowerment story, from Mr. in “The Color Purple” to Russell in “Waiting to Exhale” to Basil in “The Women of Brewster Place”. There I was just reading my book… and this chick had the bus believing that I raped my dates and thrown babies out of windows and was trying to steal alla of her stuff…