It has been met with much opposition from the conservative Christians who believe in the literal Bible – that when a couple marries they literally give their bodies to their partner. Ergo, a man can have sex with his wife whether she wants it or not.

Thankfully there has also been support of the amendment, mainly from educated women.

As a married man, I’ve been somewhat silent on the issue thus far, but a letter published in one of the papers today changed my mind. Below you’ll see a letter I wrote in response to the conservative viewpoint.

EDITOR, The Tribune.

Ever since the government proposed an amendment to the marital rape law I’ve watched with incredulity the range of discussion back and forth on the issue and, frankly, the ignorance portrayed by so many people who stand against the amendment is astounding. As a married Bahamian man I am embarrassed that so many of my fellow citizens can be so easily led down the path of ignorance.

For religious leaders in this country to publicly stand against a law that protects a woman from sexual abuse at the hands of her husband is unbelievable. In fact, it makes one wonder whether many of these men are running scared – they’re worried that if the law is passed they’ll no longer be allowed to exercise their misogynistic dominion over their wives.

The fact of the matter is that a wife claiming that her husband raped her is no different than a girlfriend claiming the same thing, or even a woman accusing her male friend. The man will not be convicted without sufficient evidence against him. An accusation does not mean instant imprisonment.

I’ve kept my mouth shut on the issue thus far, but recent letters published in the press have forced me to respond.

Many of these letters embody the rampant fallacies surrounding this issue. The various writers seem to believe that the passing of this law will increase promiscuity and infidelity among Bahamian men, and destroy the “sanctity” of marriage.

According to many of the letter writers, if a man comes home from work and requires sex and if his wife doesn’t give it to him, then the man will immediately go out and find somebody else to have sex with. The blame, of course, falls on the wife who was spiteful and only refused sex because the couple had an argument. Apparently a wife not being in the mood for lovemaking isn’t reason enough to refuse sex. Is that all it takes? Is it considered the wife’s fault that her husband cheats on her because she didn’t want sex at the same time he did (which, apparently, is spiteful behaviour)? If a man really feels this way then his marriage is already in trouble, and no marital rape law is going to exacerbate the problem.

The country is already battling with issues of infidelity, promiscuity and the decay of marriage. “Sweethearting” is rampant and, worst of all, socially accepted. The number of children growing up without fathers is increasing year after year, and in turn is helping to cause our crime rate to spiral out of control due to a lack of proper male role models in their lives. No amendment to a law is going to cause an increase in these problems – we’ve already been facing them for years, and our religious leadership is mostly staying quiet.

Simply put, good men who treat their wives with love and respect needn’t fear any marital rape law. And those men who do not treat their spouse respectfully should fear this law because what they are doing to the person they are supposed to love and cherish most in this world is disgusting and should not be tolerated in any modern society.

It comes down to a matter of love and respect. If men in this country truly loved and respected their wives, girlfriends and friends, there would be no need for this law. Unfortunately, we do need it, and nobody who considers him or herself to be a moral human being should oppose it.

A. Henderson
Nassau
October 14, 2009

Dear Ash, circa 2002,

You just graduated high school. The ceremony was pretty crap, I know. Trust me, it doesn’t get any better with nostalgia. Just be glad it’s over.

Unlike many of your high school classmates you’re not headed off to university right away. Instead you, and the parents, decided that you should stay at home for a year and work. I know the future looks uncertain – you don’t have a job yet, you don’t know where you’re going to university, you don’t know how you and your girlfriend are going to handle the continued long distance. But don’t worry, everything has a way of working out.

You won’t find a stable job until October. You’ll spend the summer flitting about, hanging out with friends, partying. You’ll work for two weeks here, two days there, but don’t worry, you’ll settle down and everything will be ok. You’ll meet some great people, and the contacts you get at the job will still come in very handy today. 

You’ll apply to a handful of top universities, but you’ll only get into one. However, the one you get in to you will have applied to only days before the application deadline – DO NOT MISS IT. Your time at university will change your life. It will teach you hard work, and the shame of failure. It will teach you about the perils of excess drinking. It will focus you. You won’t graduate with top grades, as you’ve been used to thus far, but you will have a hell of a time getting there. One tip though; do not take Intro to Computer Science as an easy credit in your fourth year. It will almost destroy you, and you’ll learn nothing from it.

University will also allow you to meet your wife, which brings me to this next point. No, things with your high school girlfriend will not work out. You’ll instigate the breakup and then you’ll second guess yourself and ask for her back. She’ll say no and devastate you. Yes, it’s very sad. But you’ll be ok. You’ll be single for about 3 months and then you’ll start dating again. And you’ll never be single again. No, you don’t meet your wife, but you’ll embark on a journey of serial monogamy. You’ll date older girls, younger girls, Jewish girls, intellectuals and some with… questionable moral fiber. But you’ll eventually meet your wife who is, frankly, incredible. She’s too good for you, but don’t let her know that.

You’ll lose your religion. It’s the best thing that’ll happen to you. You will be free. You’ll have a hard time letting go, and you’ll sound ridiculously stupid and narrow minded when you say that the Bible is true and that homosexuality is wrong, but you’ll learn. You’ll learn that no, the Bible is not true, and while it may have some good advice, it is but one view of the world, which you’ll come to understand has great historical significance but very little real impact on your own life. You’ll also meet some fabulous fabulously-gay friends and you will fight for their rights as equals. 

Unlike many of your peers you won’t spend hours agonizing over which degree to do – you’ll do English Literature, like you always knew you would, and you’ll worry about what to do with it later. Your original intent to get into the advertising industry will happen, but you’ll have to suffer through retail stores, telemarketing, coffee shops and, finally, a stint in a public relations firm to get there. But once you arrive, you’ll love it. You’ll enjoy your job so much, in fact, that you won’t even call in sick because you’ll feel bad. 

After shuffling through hobby after hobby you’ll come to pick up photography, as most college students do. But you’ll stick with it and eventually people will pay you to take photos and you’ll happily spend thousands of dollars on equipment. You’ll also make a fantastic friend through your hobby who will photograph your fabulous wedding and will guide and mentor you in photography. 

Get the tattoo you know you want. You won’t regret it. And your parents won’t be too upset.

Cherish your car, it’s the greatest one you’ll ever own. Try not to destroy it.

Grow up, but don’t worry, you’ll never grow up too much. You’ll simply become a little more thoughtful, and a little less foolish.

Curb your temper before it’s too late. 

Love your friends without hesitation. They’re the greatest people in your life.

And don’t worry, every problem, every concern, every struggle will all work out in the end. 

You’re a lucky young man, don’t take it for granted. 

I should have a running counter, like at fuel depots – 9,060 Days Without An Accident – Safety First. 

I will post here again, I promise. And I will be honest (i.e., my anonymity is no more). I have lots of news, and it was news I couldn’t say if I disguised who I was. So that’ll change.

But not right now. I’m dreadfully busy at work writing some god-awful radio ads.

This epic tale is going to gross many of you out, and for that I apologize. But, much like my missing testicle story, this tale tackles a profoundly serious medical condition that, if left untreated or unexplored, could lead to devastating medical problems. Maybe. I’m no doctor, but all I can tell you is this hurt like a bitch and it would have hurt more had I not sorted the shit out.

Flash back a little bit.

I’m around 15 years old, and my big toes began to hurt.

At first it wasn’t a huge deal; there was a little bit of pain now and again from my feet, and when I stubbed my toe I endured such agony that I seriously considered biting my toes off.

As time went on, the pain grew. When I tried to put my socks on, it hurt. The time came for me to get new shoes. Rather than get my toes checked out by the doctor first, I decided to get the shoes first and see the doctor later.

Because putting shoes on hurt my toes, I ended up buying a pair of luminous metallic purple/green Nike basketball shoes, four sizes too big, which, in the words of my friends, looked like killer whales on my feet.

They were right.

Now, I haven’t told you what my toes looked like when the socks and killer whale shoes were removed. The toes were red, and swollen. The nails were yellow. And the nail beds… oh! The nail beds. Gross. Orange/yellow congealed pus flecked with dried blood. And it smelled.

It was disgusting.

The time came when I could no longer endure the pain (or the sight or the smell) and went to the doctor.

The doc checked me out and, thanks to his eight years of schooling and countless hours of real work, determined that I had ingrown toenails. On both of my feet.

Now, I know I’m not a trained medical professional, but I would assume that the best way to get rid of ingrown toenails would be to chop them out. With a scalpel. Apparently the doctor had other ideas.

He decided to burn them out of my foot.

You heard right. Burn. Foot. Out of.

Looking back, I’m not surprised that I had reservations about this… treatment method. But at the time I assumed that doctors knew everything. After all, countless years of medical school must count for something, right?

They decided to use local anesthetic on me, which sounded fantastic until I realized it meant they would have to inject the anesthesia into the delicate inflamed decaying flesh around my toenails with gigantic fucking needles. Five times. Per toe.

Once I’d stopped convulsing from the pain, the procedure started. Some kind of miniature blowtorch was used to literally burn the nail out of my foot, as well as burn off the surrounding infected flesh.

It didn’t hurt. Not one bit. I felt a little bit of warmth around my toes from the flamethrower burning my flesh, but no pain.

I sat back as the procedure took place, and pretty soon I began daydreaming about pork. And the more I thought about it, the more I yearned for a pulled pork sandwich, or a pork chop, or even bacon. I even imagined I could smell pork being cooked.

I opened my eyes, sat up, and realized I could smell pork.

It was coming from my toes.

The smell of my own cooked flesh was literally making my mouth water. As disgusting as it was, I couldn’t stop. I was starving. If I wasn’t so inflexible I may very well have bent down and taken a bit of a nibble. I’m sure it was cooked well enough.

Sadly I couldn’t end the story at that point. Ultimately, the burning method didn’t work, so I went back and had them cut out, and have experienced no problems since.

But I still love the smell of cooked pork.

This was how I spent my summer in France; however, the story’s not over.

One day I was walking through the surrounding fields gazing at the blue sky (something I hadn’t been used to, coming from the UK) and the cows. Unbeknownst to me, electric fences are commonly used to keep cows in their respective fields. The electric current these fences emit are but a surprise for the thousand pound cows they hit. For a 7-
year old boy, the shock is more substantial.

It didn’t help that both that the fence poles are spaced pretty far apart and the electric wires are razor thin.

I was walking around, oblivious when I walked into one of these wires chest first.

It felt like I was literally kicked in the chest by a stallion.

I was thrown back at least 30 feet (though it may have really been more like one foot) with smoke coming off my chest and my shirt in tatters (ok, I lied again, but it would have been super cool had smoke actually come off of my chest).

I suffered no permanent physical damage, though it may explain some aspects of my behaviour (like my propensity to sleepwalk, though that’s another story).

I must warn you, heed my story. If you’re ever wandering in French fields keep your eyes peeled. Or the fence just may get you too.

This was new. I didn’t have cancer. I was a perfectly healthy 19-year-old boy-man-child, albeit a hung over one. Maybe that was the problem; maybe I had done something so foolish the night before that I had lost a testicle. Maybe I cut it out and offered it to a girl as a gesture of love. A fucked up way of saying “I want you to have my babies”. Maybe, just maybe, there’s a black market trade for testicles, just like kidneys. You know how people go to Turkey and wake up in a bathtub of ice with no kidneys and a note saying “sorry”? Maybe that was me, but with my ball.

Here’s how it went down.

I woke up. I reached down and scratched/made sure my… bits were still there, as most guys do first thing. It’s the most important thing in the world to many men, so we have to check on it, in case it fell off during the night. Turns out, mine just may have.

I reached down. My main actor was still on stage, no problem. One supporting actor, good. The other one… wait a minute. Where was it? I poked around… nothing. I double-checked – main actor, check. First supporting actor, check. But no number two.

I sat up, shocked.

“What the fuck?” I murmured aloud.

I jumped out of bed and ran out of my dorm room towards the communal bathrooms, still in just my boxers. I didn’t care if anyone saw, if I truly had lost a testicle I was disfigured anyway. May as well get used to a life of furtive stares and muffled giggles whenever I was around. Thankfully this was before I started sleeping naked – my nudity wouldn’t have stopped me running out, had I indeed lost my testicle.

Thankfully nobody was in the halls. It was, after all, 10am on a Wednesday. Everybody else was in class, precisely where I should have been.

I ran into the bathroom. I needed the industrial glow of halogen lights to find my lost soldier. Flipping them on, my bleary eyes squinted at the sudden onslaught of white light. The only thing more painful would have been daylight.

I reached inside my boxers and fumbled around, again. Main actor, ok. First supporting actor, ok. Holding my breath I moved my hand over slightly. Second supporting actor… was there. Hanging out, so to speak, with nary a care. I was whole again, I had been re-masculated (I know that’s not a real word, but shoot me. Crunk isn’t a real word either, yet it’ll be in the dictionary before too long).

I’m not sure how it happened. Maybe I wasn’t thinking properly when I woke up and somehow missed my second testicle, twice. Maybe it burrowed inside me for warmth and popped out while I frantically ran to the bathroom. I don’t know. But let this be a warning to all men out there. You could be next.

It reminded me of the deaths of my own fish. It began like this…

For a while, all was good. The sun would shine through my window in the morning, easing me awake with its gentle, warm caress. The rays of life-giving light would illuminate the goldfish bowl on my shelf, where my fish, Bill S. Preston, Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan, known affectionately as Bill & Ted, lived. The fish would swim laps around their little bowl. I’m not sure whether they were training for the Round-Bowl Freestyle in the 2008 Fish Olympics, held in the warm waters of the Caribbean every four years, or whether the old adage about a goldfish having but 2-human seconds worth of memory was true. I’m beginning to think it was the latter. Like the movie characters after which these fish were named they didn’t seem to be the brightest tools in the drawer.

But they made me happy, and really, for a 19 year old guy stuck in a dorm room the size of a closet and trapped in a dead-end long-distance relationship, what more could one ask for?

I would sit and watch them swim for hours, their little mouths opening and closing as if they were trying to express their gratitude to me, their benevolent god, with voices too tiny to hear (not all benevolent gods are omnipotent). As boring as watching fish swim may be, it was worlds better than writing a political science paper, or talking to my very strange roommate (more on him later).

But one day, tragedy struck.

I woke up, but something had changed. There was little sunlight. The air felt chilly. Something was wrong.

Bill was dead.

Maybe Ted was dead. It was hard to tell the difference.

I wish I had reacted appropriately. I should have cried. Maybe I should have even fell to my knees, screaming at the sky, “Noooo!”. I could even have added a, “Whyyyyy?”.

Instead, I went “eww” and found a cup to scoop Bill or Ted out of the bowl. I had a small funeral for him in the nearby communal toilets where I spoke of his love for Ted or Bill, and his devotion to his shared home. In fact, I like to think of myself as helping to ushering in gay marriage, at least in the goldfish community.

I went back to my room and comforted Ted or Bill. I took solace in the fact that I had one fish remaining. The rest of the day was dark. I rocked back and forth in the corner, holding back my sobs of anguish.

The next morning I woke again, knowing there was something else wrong. The sky was near black, and there was not a sound. It was as if the entire animal community was mourning. For I found another dead fish floating in the bowl.

So distraught by the death of his partner, Bill or Ted had followed Ted or Bill to the great fishy beyond, a warm turquoise blue ocean where they could swim together forever, without fear or hesitation.

You’ll be shocked to learn that people have blamed me for the deaths of Bill and Ted. “You shouldn’t have dumped both fish into cold tap water right away” they said. “You didn’t even change the water after one fish died? No wonder the other kicked the bucket!”

To these charlatans of concern I say, “Do not blame me. For it was their time. The great fishy god of the sea (a licensed subsidiary of the Flying Spaghetti Monster) called His children home. They lived together, they died together, and are as united in death and they were in life.”

Peace be with you, Bill. S. Preston, Esq., September 2008 – September 2008.

Peace be with you too, Ted “Theodore” Logan, September 2008 – September 2008.

May you rest eternal.

But, back to emotions.

Like I said, I’ve always been very emotionally stable. I don’t get angry a lot; I don’t get sad a lot. I’m not saying I’m immune to mood swings; after all, what good is life if it doesn’t affect you in some way.

I know a lot of people in northern-North America and Europe get the “winter blues”. However, when I was at University in the near-Arctic Circle I never experienced this. I spent much of my childhood in the UK and was always happy. I think that the outside world, and especially things I couldn’t change, like the weather, just really didn’t affect me.

But things began to change a couple of years back.

A few of my friends attended university in the UK. They would come home to a much warmer climate and complain about the grey skies, the pale and unfriendly people and the bitter cold. I was never able to empathize with them, as my memories of the UK were distinctly different. I remembered sunny warm days, beautiful green countryside, old monasteries, churches and castles. I remembered smiling, happy faces and blue skies above. Of course it rained occasionally, but not that much, I would argue.

A couple of years ago, after my university graduation in the near-Arctic Circle, I decided to move back to England (as an aside, more stories of England will now follow in the near future, now that I’ve unleashed some of the truth from my anonymity). My student visa in the near-Arctic Circle had run out, and I had little desire to move back to the warmth that was home.

I went to England full of hope and confidence, my head and my heart full of happy memories and idealized visions of the weather.

And they were all wrong. It was cold. It was damp. It was just plain dreary. The people were cold. The people were pale. And the people were unfriendly.

I was used to cold. In my university days I would brave -20*C weather to get to class. Snow would fall in buckets, until it became too cold to snow. And I loved it. I loved seeing the sun shining off of a frozen lake. The white of the snow hurting your eyes it was so bright. It was gorgeous.

But England, oh England had the kind of damp air that would seep through your clothes and chill you to the bone. In Canada you’d merely walk inside to warm up. In England I found that you had to change each and every item of clothing you wore to avoid hypothermia.

But, in some ways, the worst part of the experience was the way the weather, grey skies and all, affected me. I became disillusioned. I became unmotivated. I became sad. It was the most depressed I had ever been in my entire life, and I hated it. I hated feeling that way, and most of all I hated the way I allowed the external environment to dictate the way I felt.

So I left.

I finally understood what my friends, and much of the wider world, had been talking about when they discussed British weather.

I still love the UK. I have many friends there still, I had a very happy childhood, and I have some lovely memories.

But I’ll be damned if I can handle that dreary weather for more than a 2-week vacation!

So now I can post from the website at home, from email at work and from my iPhone while away from either.

Your scheduled programming can now resume.

Ribbons of white light shine over my face, the ceiling lights reflected off the gleaming steel blade that slices with ease through the soft flesh of the fish. Piles of rice, seaweed, ginger, wasabi and all manner of culinary accessories surround the small Asian chef as I watch with baited breath, yearning for my time to come.

My chopsticks tap anxiously on the table. My foot taps on the floor. Silence surrounds me. There’s no need for conversation. The same thought runs through all of our heads:

It’s sushi time.

Ice clinks against the glass in my hand, my tongue tasting the bitter but pleasant flavour of the scotch. The liquid of the martini you hold carelessly in your hand sloshes dangerously close to the rim of the glass, but somehow remains in place.

You smile flirtatiously at me over the rim of your glass, as you listen intently to whatever nonsense I happen to be spouting – knowing me it could be anything from politics to religion to Battlestar Galactica. Your ability to take an interest in anything that matters to me has always been one of the things that I love about you, and I am reassured that this is unlikely to go away anytime soon.

The room around us is busy, but not bustling, as I would have expected on this particular night. There’s a young, attractive couple, well dressed, having drinks at the bar as we lounge on one of the faux-suede couches. It becomes apparent later that the woman is from Chicago, only here to visit her male ‘friend’, though he obviously wishes he were something else to her.

The wife of the owner and executive chef lounges on a couch across from us. She is with her friends but is alone in her thoughts. Her tear-filled eyes catch mine, and she softly smiles a sad smile. Everybody else in the room is upset about the restaurant closing down, but their main concern is finding a new place to drink. For her, this is the end of a journey, and the destruction of a dream.

This place, an oasis of chic civilization in the middle of a desert of uncouth alcoholics, holds memories of suck good times that it’s hard to let it go. You said I should have brought a camera to remember, but a simple photograph merely captures the appearance of this place. Essence, and memory, eludes a still image.

I’ve never had a place like this. A place I’m excited to go to, a place I feel good at, a place where, for lack of a better term, everybody knows your name.

And I’m not sure if I will again.

So, firstly, the IRL issue.

There’s a weird relationship between people you know on the Internet and people you know in real life, and those that merge together.

The Internet is fantastic for temporary anonymity (though, as we all know that anonymity can be fleeting) and/or for saying things that you would never EVER say in person. Those can range anywhere from horrendously bigoted and hateful comments on other people’s blogs or confessions about who/what you did last night, what your religious or political views are, and other not-fit-for-the-dinner-table topics of conversation.

These confessions, even if done under your own name, are relatively easy when you think that nobody you know IRL knows what you’re up to online. I.e., posting a tweet on Twitter about how much you enjoy twittering/blogging/wasting time at work seems fine and dandy when your colleagues don’t know your twitter account, but sooner or later that’s going to bite you in the ass. I’m still waiting for my shit to hit the fan, but I’m sure it’s inevitable.

Because the truth is, someone that you personally know is always watching/reading/listening, whether you realize or not. All it takes is, say, a Twitter search of my name to find me. Which isn’t necessarily a good thing.

But then you, occasionally, become true friends, IRL, with someone you began knowing online. And they like you, often, because of your online persona that sometimes is your real persona that you hide from many people or it may be a different persona, and then you run into problems.

But anyway, onto the original theme of this post, the person who writes semi-anonymously but who I know through someone IRL…

In one of her most recent posts she wrote about graduating university in the upcoming days. She speaks of feeling like she’s a fraud, as she breezed through high school and university, choosing her major because she could easily satisfy the degree requirements, “the key word being ‘easily’”. She speaks of skipping classes, and not completely immersing herself in university and its lifestyle, both social and academic, like everybody else.

And, you know what? I agree. Because in many ways I feel the same.

I’ve always been very intelligent. I know that sounds obnoxiously conceited, but I can’t help it. I’m not a dumb man, not in the slightest, and I know it. But I’ve always been exceedingly lazy. I’ve always put the very minimum amount of effort into my life, all aspects of it.

I breezed through high school with nary a care.

I, more or less, breezed through university too. It was much harder than I expected, and I had to study harder than I had ever studied in my life, but I didn’t throw myself into my studies as some did. I’d skip classes, drink the night before an exam, pretend to study; even pull all-nighters to bang out 6,000 word essays that I had put off until the last possible moment, stagger into class to hand them in before going home immediately to sleep and skip the rest of the day. 

I always did relatively well, but what always kills me is that I could have done better. I could have graduated with honors. I could have gone to grad school. Hell, at the very minimum I could have done well enough to get a scholarship to help my poor parents out with my university fees.

But I didn’t.

I did the bare minimum and breezed through.

So, while I don’t feel like a complete fraud, I don’t feel like a complete success, either.

Well, we have a new contender for the title of crazy search:

“does charcoal affect the taste of semen?”

I’m glad I’m getting search traffic from somewhere though!!

Varying flavors of Mercedes, BMW, Lexus and the occasional Porsche and Aston Martin whiz through the narrow roads, their drivers and passengers cut off from the oppressive heat by tinted windows and air-conditioning.

This is the city that the tourists, whizzing by on rented mopeds with braided hair, wife-beaters and shorts, see; their pale, flabby thighs jostling as their scooter hits bumps in the road. Their eyes, protected by expensive polarized sunglasses, gaze in wonder at the luxury around them, thinking how lucky the people who live here are. It’s paradise, they must think.

But the city has another face.

This face is open to the world; yet wealthy eyes pass over it as if it doesn’t exist.

This alternate city is filled with poverty and garbage. Hard working families struggling to get by with honest labor, while gangsters and drug lords roll by in black Escalades with shiny chrome rims. The shine of the chrome, glimmering on the cracked inner-city roads, mirrors a disparity between the grunge of the streets, the honest ambitions of the lower class and the quick wealth and short life that the drug trade can give.

There are those who wander between these two worlds, those looking equally for a handout from the struggling lower class, the generous middle and upper class and those of all three classes whose apologizing faces and feeble “sorry” belies their inherent selfishness.

 A small, thin man wanders the streets, waving his arms in the air and muttering to himself. His back is hunched, his eyes earnest and wide, and while he is in this world his mind is somewhere else. He sticks his hands out at passing cars as if he expects change to be flung in the air, landing in his palm, but merely shuffles along as nothing appears, seemingly unfazed. At times he stands at the foot of a major bridge squeaking through a child’s plastic saxophone, as if busking for change. But change rarely appears.

There are similar stories to this man, hundreds even. There’s the man whose head is scarred by acid, from an accident years past. There’s a tall, muscular man, perpetually high who begs for the funds to support his heroin addiction, who is oftentimes seen shooting up with a syringe as he walks, barefoot, throughout the gritty streets. There’s another man, soft-spoken who quietly begs for change with shame in his eyes, though as the years have passed the shame has turned to sadness with a twinge of anger. There was once an old, frail man, bent almost ninety-degrees with age that shuffled around the major roads of the city, dressed in rags so dirty the original color had fled.

Some of these men walk around with an air of danger and instability. There was a pair of brothers who allegedly murdered a doctor. One brother died or disappeared. The other brother wanders the streets, his teeth rotten and yellow, eyes darting for the next passerby to accost. He has a fake friendliness, infused with an allusion of menace, while he asks for a mere “ninety cents” to get something to eat.  He has a good memory for faces, recognizing the same person on the street, in gas stations, in a mall parking lot. Those same people recognize him, but shy away for a multitude of reasons, not limited to disgust, fear and apathy.

But there are those who seem to not only enjoy their life on the street, but also have chosen that way of life.

One of these men is affectionately known as “Potcake”. He wanders the downtown street with a shopping cart filled with memories and adorned with hubcaps. Street children steal hubcaps from parked cars and sell them to Potcake. Potcake, in turn, sells them back to the original owners. He wanders shirtless, his massive gut leading the way, with sunglasses and headphones that are never plugged into anything. His cart frequently contains hand-written messages scrawled on a scrap of cardboard. These can range from “Potcake says don’t worry” to local political commentary to a photo of Obama and the word “hope” when Obama won the election.

Another more interesting and, in some ways, tragic story is a man called Andre. Andre was a schoolmate of my father in an elite, private high school. His immediate family consists of immensely wealthy Europeans. Andre got into drugs at a young age, eventually graduating to cocaine. His family shipped him off to Europe and to clinics across the United States at one time or another for rehab, but every time he would come home, work for a couple of months and fall off the wagon. He wanders the streets, arms scarred and at crooked angles from a machete incident with a local street vendor, talking to himself with a stray dog or two for company. Andre seems happy and content with his life on the street.

Happier, maybe, than many in comfortable homes and wealth-producing professions.

I was thinking about parents the other day. Not specifically my parents, just parents in general and family units. My main train of thought was how it’s funny how the family unit, and the definition of family, has changed so much over time. In the old days it was a father and mother and a horde of snotty-nosed kids. You occasionally had those kids from “broken homes” for whom that was an excuse for their bad behaviour. “Oh, it’s not his fault he tore the limbs off of that little girl, he’s from a broken home” teachers would say. Well, maybe not exactly that, but you catch my drift.

But the general rule of thumb at least appeared to be that kids from a traditional family unit were well adjusted, and the ones from broken or non-traditional families were oftentimes troublemakers, or at least not well adjusted. But this has never proven to necessarily be the case, though admittedly life is often easier with two parents.

For example:

A friend of mine grew up without her father, as is not unusual. But it wasn’t the “normal” story of dad went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Her mother, when she found out she was pregnant, left the father without him knowing he was going to have a child. But that’s not the point. She recently hired a detective agency to find him. A couple weeks later they discovered where he was, and she had her first meeting with him over the weekend, which didn’t go especially well. But that’s not the point either.

The Wife lost her mother to breast cancer when she was only 10, so she grew up with only her father. She turned out fine, but The Wife’s sister, while fine now, went through a few periods of trouble as a teenager.

My own mother lost both her parents when she was a child, and grew up with grandparents and attended boarding school, and turned out wonderfully (my mother is a saint, and anyone who says otherwise shall be immediately castrated and/or hysterectomy-ified. And yes, that’s not a word, I know.

The point is that the very notion of family is changing. For some, it’s a mother, father and siblings. For others it’s a single parent. For some, themselves and their grandparents are family. And for others it may be a group of close friends with no blood connection at all.

But I still think it’s important for a child, and for the people raising a child, for there to be a team. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a mother and a father. It can be a mother and a mother or a father and a father. Or grandparents. Or an aunt and an uncle. Whatever it is, there needs to be, in my opinion, a dual set of parents, whatever they may be.

This blog has taken a surprising direction. I’ve found that not only am I not as funny as I hoped I was, and intended to be, but I’m enjoying more and more serious blog posts on news, politics, religion, etc. The side effect of this is that the more posts I write that focus on current events, the more diligent I have to be in my research. Which irritates me, because I’m supremely lazy.

But this is an idea that will be expanded on in a later blog post.

I’d like to talk about two things today – dragon semen and awful women drivers.

I wrote a piece on a conversation I had the other day with The Wife regarding dragon semen tasting like charcoal, a point she took great issue with. I, however, happen to not respect her opinion on the matter because she (a) has never tasted dragon semen, and until I find someone who has and can tell me without a doubt that it does NOT taste like charcoal, I’m simply going to assume I’m right. And (b) her favourite animal, in real life, is a unicorn. Which, clearly, is not real.

So I was looking at my blog stats for the other day (the dragon semen piece), and I had three visitors. One was myself before I logged in. So it doesn’t really count (but I still pretend it does), but then I had two others, unaccounted for. Now my blog is quite new, so I don’t expect an influx of visitors. I had quite a few visitors on one day where I wrote about my views on gay marriage, but generally it’s been fairly quite.

But I checked where my surprise visitors had come from, and get this, it was a search engine. What did they search for, you may ask? Dragon semen. Seriously.

Who the fuck Google’s “dragon semen”? I know I’m fucking up the search rankings for “dragon semen” by using it seven times in this post so far, but come on. Are people trying to figure out how to create human/dragon hybrids? A scaly child with wings that blows fire? Gross.

For fun I did actually Google “dragon semen” (that’s eight now) and I came across a fan-fiction piece. I didn’t click on it (I was far too scared) but the excerpt that Google gave me was something to do with a woman, uhhh, receiving dragon semen (nine). Needless to say I clicked away very, very quickly.

So, onto women drivers.

Now, ok, I know that many women are, in fact, excellent drivers. I know too that many men are awful, awful drivers. So I’m perpetuating a gender stereotype. But it’s my blog, and I’m allowed to do that. Also, women did the only two instances I have ever seen of a driver somehow getting their car stuck on a wall. And that’s exactly what I want to talk about.

My office spans two lots of land. One lot has the small office building on it, and the other is an empty lot where we park, and where (one day) the new office building will go. There’s a low wall on the roadside of the property, which is, roughly, 2 feet high. So the wall is not very tall at all.

The other day we in the office hear a loud bump. We look out of the glass door and we see a car, the front end perched atop the wall, with a woman in the drivers seat, gunning the engine like she was in a NASCAR race. Unfortunately for her, the car was going nowhere.

I thought about going out to help her, I really did. But then I realized that her stupidity was the reason for her getting on the wall in the first place and, frankly, stupidity isn’t punished enough.

Luckily a truck of workmen happened to be driving by and stopped to help a damsel in distress. One of my colleagues turned to me and said “Man, if that was a dude, no way them fellas was gonna stop to help. He’d be on his own!”

After a multitude of efforts to push the car off the wall using all the manly strength they could muster, they gave up that idea, moved a rung up the evolutionary ladder and used tools. Specifically a sledgehammer. Against our wall.

Not that we minded, the wall is falling down from previous battles between concrete and vehicle, but still, you would have thought they would ask for permission first.

So, eventually the car came off the wall. With a grateful look, the damsel in distress hopped into the car and, pedal to the metal, very quickly reversed into the road (her lead foot appears to be the reason she got on the wall in the first place).

Hopping out of the car to thank the guys, with the car on and keys in the ignition, she let the door swing shut.

It locked.

Obviously, this wasn’t the damsel’s lucky day.

Luckily for her, the men were still around to help. Unluckily for the car, they were hardly trained in lock picking.

Pliers were used, to try and pick the lock I guess. Didn’t work.

Various pieces of metal were used to try and wedge between the roof and door, the car body and door, and the window and door. Didn’t work.

They even used one of those big, industrial angle tools to try and wedge down the car door.

We knew they weren’t going to get it open that way. Best case scenario they scratched the door and glass, and quite possibly destroyed the motor inside the door itself.

But, hey, it’s not their car, so why worry, right?

Eventually one of the men, who had been quietly working on the back door, managed to force the window down enough for him to unlock the doors, enabling the woman to give hugs to all but one of the men (he was fat and the others thin. Take that how you want) and drive away.

I have to admit, I was secretly hoping her wheel would fall off as she drove away, or a piece of chassis would fall to the roadside, but nothing seemed to happen.

Some people have all the fun. 

It’s always risky asking The Wife what her favourite animal is. Depending on the age of the person asking she is either very enthusiastic or rather embarrassed. Enthusiastic if the asker is under the age of 7. Embarrassed if they are not.

This is because The Wife’s favourite animal is the unicorn.

Mermaids and fairies are close runners up.

And she’s dead serious.

Now, The Wife is a very smart, very grown up, very mature young woman. She just feels that the unicorn is both beautiful and hypothetically possible. Just because someone has never seen a verifiable unicorn doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. After all, “many other animals have horns” she says. Whatever faith she lacks in religion she more than makes up for in unicorns. Which is fine.

So we were chatting the other day, when the conversation got onto the topic of dragon semen. Now, I’ll be honest. I don’t remember how or why we got on to the topic of dragon semen, but that’s not important. What’s important is the fact that we did.

Me: “You’d get that charcoal-taste in your mouth though, from dragon semen.”

The Wife: “Charcoal? Why would dragon semen taste like charcoal?”

Me: “Well, it’s obvious. A dragon breathes fire, so its semen would obviously taste like charcoal.”

The Wife: “But fire doesn’t come out of its penis. Why would the semen taste like charcoal?”

Me: “Well… if I ate asparagus, I’d taste like asparagus…” (I began to realize that I was losing the argument).

The Wife: “A dragon’s diet is animals, princesses and knights. Not charcoal. There’s no reason for it to taste like charcoal.”

I finally realized that her usually sensible nature had won out over my hypothetical conjecture over the taste of dragon semen.

So I used my trump card.

“Listen, woman” I said. This earned me a steely-eyed glare. “I don’t think that someone who thinks the unicorn is not only real, but is her favourite animal, should be lecturing me about the taste of dragon semen.”

That shut her up. For now. At least until I say something stupid again. 

Rights-groups have their panties in a twist over the news that Barack Obama does not intend to prosecute those CIA agents (and others) who performed controversial torture techniques on suspected terrorists, who were captured and deemed dangerous by the government.

Now, before I get into this, I am all for human rights. I think that the situation at Abu Ghraib was disgusting. I’m so glad that Obama has decided to stick to his word and shut down Guantanamo Bay. I think that torture techniques such as water-boarding are horrendous and should never be used. Despite Bush’s claims to the contrary, Iraq and Afghanistan are wars, and prisoners-of-war should be treated as such.

Yet, I don’t think these CIA operatives are necessarily the bad guys. Soldiers are conditioned to kill. They’re conditioned to see their enemy as less than human, and to take emotion out of the equation. I read a book a few years back called “On Killing” by retired Lt. Col. Dave Grossman. In the book Grossman compared military data from as far as back as the War of Independence to show that humans have a natural aversion to killing, but are trained and conditioned by the military to kill enemy combatants more effectively. For example, in the old days when two armies would meet on the battlefield, line up and shoot towards each other, far less men died than statistically should have. Even if you take into account the failure rates and inherent inaccuracies of both the guns and the shooters, Grossman concluded that many soldiers either didn’t fire or would aim to miss. In each subsequent major conflict, as military training and conditioning increased, the death rate increased proportionately.

My point is that these men are military professionals and are trained to kill, trained to devalue human life and trained to follow orders without question.

But the real issue is that these orders came straight from the top. So if these particular men didn’t torture prisoners, then someone else down the line would have. Therefore it seems silly to prosecute them, when the real criminals were the ones who ordered and condoned this type of behaviour.

There’s a new restaurant that’s opened down the street from my office. This restaurant has an ever-changing menu, and serves mainly wraps and salads. I pretend the food is healthy, merely because it’s not deep fried chicken, but I know it’s really not that healthy. Have I read the nutritional information? No. Have I spoken at length to the chef to ask them what ingredients they use? No. I know it’s not healthy because it tastes fucking good. And anything that tastes THAT fucking good can, in no way, shape or form, be that healthy.

The problem is that the restaurant is expensive. Well, it’s not too expensive. $8 for a wrap. But then you factor in $3 for juice, $2 for chips, and you end up spending over $50 a week for lunch.

So The Wife has decreed that I am to not spend money on lunch for two weeks. So while my co-workers are orgasm-ing (sometimes literally, in a figurative sense) over the daily menu, or bringing KFC or Wendy’s back to work (I don’t especially like KFC, but the smell is intoxicating) I am brown-bagging my lunch. I’m not actually brown-bagging it; a lunchbox is what I’m using. And not a cool or old-school lunchbox. No. I’m using a thermos children’s lunchbox. The same kind of lunchbox I used to cram into my backpack in school, before I became cool enough to buy lunch.

As men, we only have a short time to assert our independence. As a child, the mom controls you. She chooses what you wear, what you eat, and where and when you go. Then, you get older and begin to dress yourself, choose what to eat and how to eat it, and you come and go as you please. Eventually you’re a well-adjusted man, capable of deciding his own destiny.

Then you meet a woman.

Once the relationship turns serious, and especially once you’re living together/engaged/married, your independence falls by the wayside. Your partner now decides what you eat, and where you go. Hence her decree to not eat out (to clarify, I’m not mad. I know she’s merely watching out for my weight and our finances [probably so she can buy a new purse]).

So, seeing as I have to carry my lunch to work in something, I’ve come up with two alternatives to the brown bag and the crappy lunchbox I’m using now.

1. Old-school kickin-it-retro child’s lunchbox

While the image shown here is Transformers, any number of childhood characters can be substituted. G.I. Joe (or Action Man for the Brits). X-Men. Fraggle Rock. Even the Muppets are acceptable. Trolls (the ones with the fluffy hair and lack of genitalia) are even appropriate, as long as they are the manly fighting trolls, not the girly sing-along songs trolls (I won a contest as a kid and received the wrong prize, but that’s another story).

Clearly this lunchbox is so un-cool that it’s cool. There’s scientific evidence behind this, but it’s far too complex to go into detail about here.

2. Really old-school construction-worker’s lunchbox

My last post on gay marriage was written in a rush. As a result it wasn’t that well thought out, that well written and it didn’t express what I really wanted to say. In short, it didn’t serve its purpose.

First I need to give you a bit of background on myself, so you may understand a little more clearly where I am coming from, and how far I have come.

I grew up in a strongly religious household. I attended church every week. I prayed. I read the Bible. And I believed. I believed that despite the doubts I held that the word of God was absolute and correct, and above question, suspicious or hesitation. If the Bible decreed that a homosexual lifestyle was wrong in the eyes of God, then wrong it was, regardless of how I felt about it.

I remember having various doubts about Christianity. I didn’t want to believe that good people who happened to not be Christian would be destined for an eternity of damnation, or that we could declare their religion “wrong”. People told me that God works in mysterious ways and that we have no idea what happens to those “non-believers” after death, but I always felt that they were simply trying to assuage m worries.

Yet I rarely questioned further. Blind acceptance, more or less.

Growing up I was a typical homophobic male teen. “Gay” was a regular part of my vocabulary, as an epithet for “shitty”, “bad”, “stupid”, etc. “You’re so gay” or “You’re such a fag” was a regular part of my vocabulary.

I was taught to see gay people as something strange, something different, something immoral and something unnatural. And I followed blindly. My parent’s positions on the topic haven’t changed. While it’s wrong to hate gay people and to be cruel to them, it’s not wrong to expect them to tone down their lifestyle and live a life of celibacy. “We”, as Christians, cannot condone the homosexual lifestyle, and we must hate the sin, not the sinner. While, thankfully, my parents believe that homosexuality is biological and that gay people don’t choose to be gay, they do believe that living a gay lifestyle is a sin and that people must learn to control it. My mother equated it to a mental illness, such as anger management. You have no control over having it, but you must learn to control it. Apparently, just as you can’t go around punching people in anger you also cannot go around fucking people of the same gender. Celibacy or hell, more or less. 

I jumped ahead a little there, forgive me.

It all changed when I went to university and met and befriended gay people who were completely out and who were happy and satisfied with who they were. By getting to know them I became aware that gay people were not inherently immoral, their sexually was neither a choice nor a mental handicap and they were some of the kindest, gentlest people I had ever met.

Those of you who have been raised in liberal households and surrounded by open and happy gay people all your lives may see this revelation as being silly. But to me it was an eye opener.

While I still had some remnants of my Christian faith left I tried to reconcile my religious background with my newfound life experiences. Why not allow gay people to have civil ceremonies, I argued. That would give them all the health, tax and insurance benefits without stepping on the toes of the religious establishment by calling it “marriage”.

As my faith slipped away my support of gay rights (and other “left-wing” beliefs such as pro-choice and the absolute separation of church and state) grew.

In the end I’ve come to the conclusion that, frankly, I see no reason why gay marriage should even be an issue. It shouldn’t have to be an issue. It should be so widely accepted and tolerated that there should be no need for protests or marches or conservative pundits discussing the downfall of American morality.

People on all sides of the religious and political sphere can live in harmony. When over half of marriages end in divorce, when crime is rampant, when you have people in awful, abusive marriages and relationships, there is no reason why two people in a loving, committed relationship should not be legally and spiritually joined together, if that’s what they choose.

Belgium, Canada, The Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain and Sweden all allow same-sex marriage. Connecticut, Massachusetts, Iowa and Vermont in the US allow same-sex marriage. A number of countries, including the UK and Germany allow civil partnerships.

The world is changing. We’re facing a number of horrific issues, such as a volatile and war-torn Middle East, economic threats from China and India, violent threats from Iran and North Korea, and the worst economic recession in many, many years.

Do we really have time, or even the need, to argue about people who just want to love each other? We need love more than ever, and we shouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that. 

People who usually fly along at double the speed limit suddenly age 40 years and drive like an old person – super slow, hunched over the wheel. Traffic grinds to a halt, deliveries don’t get done and nothing functions.

Ok, I admit, I hate the rain. I hate getting wet in the first place and being damp and cold for hours afterwards. I hate having to change my clothes. I hate having to run to my car scrambling for my keys. But it doesn’t make me stop functioning as a human being.

In the last couple of weeks both Vermont and Iowa have legalized gay marriage, recognizing that denying a basic American right to its citizens is, at best unconstitutional and at worse discriminatory.

If you know me personally, and as you may be able to tell from the few posts on here, I am very liberal and am a big supporter of gay rights. I can’t think of any reason in the slightest that gay people shouldn’t be free to marry the one that they love. The passing of Proposition 8 in California, and the thought that something similar could happen in other states and even other countries throughout the world sickened me tremendously.

The interesting thing about Vermont’s success is that it wasn’t a courtroom drama, but rather a legislative passing. Vermont’s legislature (narrowly) overrode the state governor’s veto to make gay marriage legal.

In the past conservatives have blamed “activist judges” for trying to further the so-called gay agenda. They saw the judges as one person trying to circumvent the will of the people. In Vermont’s case there is no way of saying that. Vermont government officials were elected by the people to speak for the people. So, essentially, the people of Vermont have spoken. This has, in some ways, taken some of the wind out of the sails of the homophobic right, which is never a bad thing.

But despite the victories that proponents of gay marriage may enjoy, it’s important to remember that the road ahead is long and full of struggle. If Proposition 8 taught us anything it’s that victory is never absolute and the supporters of ‘traditional’ marriage won’t go down without a fight. Thankfully, despite the crushing defeat of Prop 8 to the LGBT community, the knowledge and recognition that a win isn’t always permanent has energized the community tremendously.

Change, both across the US and the world, is coming. Have patience.  

(I’m not entirely happy with this post. I think the writing is a little sloppy, but frankly I’m not in the mood to edit it)