Recent Revelations

Whatever store I walk into, the clerk is not necessarily going to be dismissive of me. He/she is not necessarily going to treat me like my mother treated me, or like a snarky pseudo-intellectual or gay guy would treat me. (Once I left my mean home for college, I was immediately thrust into an equally mean world of both bitchy intellectuals and, once I came out as gay, bitchy gays.) Recently, I figured out that many store clerks are perfectly pleasant and nice young people without attitudes. I have only recently figured out that I could relax a bit. My place in the world is not in relation to my parents---though, online, it's still kind of in relation to the leftist creeps that I first came across when I first entered college in 1983. Despite the fact that I was very bright, I didn't read the "correct" publications, so I was mocked by the University of Texas "Daily Texan" staff when I tried to join. In my early poetry classes in the '80s at UT-Austin, I was ignored for not being either beautiful or Hemingway; in my '90s grad school poetry classes at San Francisco State, I was ignored because I didn't present myself as gay---though, as it turned out, I WAS actually gay! (Today, poetry mags censor writers for using the word "nigger" in context, or refuse to publish writers if they're not black/hispanic/gay enough. Every single system is rigged by idiots-of-the-era who think they're somehow "avant garde" when in fact they're the most bourgeois, generic thinkers of all, responding only to what their cohorts are encouraging them to think.)