jeremyfeist.com

I’m not a violent person, I swear. The closest I come is when I do a BDSM scene with my boyfriend, and even then, he’s the dom and I’m the sub. I make for an excellent pain sponge, but that’s it.

That being said, don’t mistake my unwillingness to fight as an inability to do so. When you grow up with three brothers with Irish blood (read: Beer.) in their veins, you kind of need to figure out how to defend yourself so that your face doesn’t turn into a shapeless meat-form that resembles undercooked roast beef. That means that you need to figure out how to take a punch and how to deliver one right back. If someone cried, Mom or Dad would magically appear with an ice pack and a heaping helping of screamed guilt. And then it would start again the next day.

The training helped toughen me up a bit, which helped balance out my more fey and delicate attributes. Yes, I baked cookies and I couldn’t throw a football for shit, but I could also take a right hook to the jaw without breaking down and hold my own in a fight. It was a useful skill to have, albeit one I didn’t plan on using all that often, not that I was given many opportunities to do so.

This is the story of the one time I had to use it.

In grade school, I fell in with the weirdos and geeks, which really shouldn’t surprise you in any way. It was me, Warren, Rylee, Ryan R., and Marco F. We would all one day grow up to be writers, artists and pyrotechnics, but at the time, we were just a bunch of kids who liked playing Gamecube and watching Marco F. find new and exciting ways to blow up anything we could find using fireworks he stole from his Dad.

One day, we were at Ryan’s house, busy sculpting dinosaurs out of plasticine  so that Marco could stick a firecracker up its ass and blow it right back into extinction. We’d huddle around the tiny clay monster, standing mid-rampage in his driveway with the fuse of a cherrybomb sticking out of its ass, before a loud CRACK would turn it into clay shrapnel. We were prepping the next blast victim, a poorly-crafted stegosaurus who looked like thalidomide pinata, when Joey R. came up to us.

Oh Joey R. What a fucking chode that guy was. Joey went to another school, but due to his proximity to Ryan’s house, he would still zero in on me. What can I say? I was an easy target. Between my hand-me-down clothes and the sissier qualities imbued upon me by my latent gayness, I might as well have painted a target on my head while wearing a shirt that said “Ask me about my oh-so punchable face!” I had enough bruises, cuts and bumps from him to last me for a looooooong time. Actually, if you look closely at the left-side of my forehead, you can still see a very tiny scar he left me with.

That day, Joey decided to announce his arrival by smacking his stick against the road as he approached, flanked by his nameless toadies. I’m not sure if they even had names. If they were characters in a movie, they would have been billed as “bully kid #1″ and “bully kid #2″. They were classic 80′s movie bullies, right down to their preppy-haircuts and suburban-punk clothes, and they too came packing heat with their hockey sticks and a bag of paintballs.

“Hey gay faggots, what are you doing? Being gay?” he said, his taunting arsenal built entirely around various permutations of “faggot”.

“Shut up, Joey. We’re playing Dinosaur-Killing Meteors,” said Ryan, trying to brush off the trio of dicks.

“We’re playing gay Dinosaur-Killing fag Meteors!” mimicked back Joey, in a high-pitched tone.

“Go away Joey, no one here even likes you,” I said trying to move them along as quickly as I could.

“Whatever queer, you’re a gay fag anyway.”

This wasn’t the response I was looking for. “Go away, or else we’ll tell Ryan’s Mom on you,” I said. Yeah, I know. Real scary threat.

Having exhausted his supply of “fag” synonyms, Joey decided to move on to the next phase of his genius plan. Bully kid #1 handed Joey his bag of paintballs, and Joey preceded to grab a handful and slam them into the side of my head.

The force of the paintballs against my head must have knocked a part of my brain lose, or triggered something primal deep inside of my id, because in the instant between when my eyes instinctively closed for the blow, and when they finally opened again, I somehow managed to pry the hockey stick out of Joey’s hands, wrestle him to the ground, force the shaft of the stick against his throat, and deliver blow after blow to his head.

“JEREMY!” came a shrill, angry voice behind me. I turned around to see my mother, stepping out of her sedan and marching towards me. How the hell had I forgotten I had asked her to pick me up? Of course, the one time I would get into a fight with someone other than my brothers, she’d still find a way to track me down and scold me for fighting.

I got up off of the shaking, beaten hulk that was Joey and made my way over to my Mom’s car, where my first instinct was to look in her side mirror to make sure my hair was all right. Yes, even when I was in total shit and my knuckles were covered in the snot and blood of the bully whose ass I just kicked, my primary concern was whether or not my hair looked good. Joey and his lackies retreated back to his house, while Ryan and my friends sequestered themselves back into Ryan’s place.

“It’s not my fault, Mom! He was bullying me!” I said, trying to lessen the time I’d eventually have to do for this one.

“Just get in the car,” she said, whisking me back home away from the scene of my little crime.

Back home, my parents sat me down in the lecture chair for what I could only assume would be a long talking-to, followed by heaping helpings of guilt, shame and grounding. My Dad sighed, looked at my mother, then back to me. “You understand that what you did was wrong, right?”

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself for what was going to come next.

“Good,” said my mother. “Okay, you’re free to go.”

And that was it. “What?”

“Just take it and go,” said my Dad.

“Okay,” I said, running down to the basement to play Mario Party 4.

Yeah, go figure. My parents caught me in the act of completely beating the shit out of a kid, and all I got for it was a reassurance that my moral compass didn’t need to be recalibrated. How the hell did that happen?

Looking back on it now, I think part of the reason I was given a pass was because my parents recognized that there was a difference between my defending myself and Joey bullying me. Kids these days are being given two competing messages: That they will be victimized by bullies, and that fighting back is wrong.

Bullshit.

Here’s the thing: Whenever Joey would punch me in the nose or kick my ass or beat me up, he was trying to tell me that I was powerless and that he was stronger than me. When I finally snapped and kicked Joey’s ass for a change, what I was saying was “no I’m not, now stop punching me you dick.” He tried countless times to get his message across and failed. I gave him my message once, and guess what? It went through. I stood up for myself, and do you know how many times he beat me up after I showed him I wasn’t a push-over?

Zero. Never again. I stood up to a bully, and he never tried to fuck with me again.

Let’s get this straight: I’m not proud of myself for beating someone up. Absolutely not. I am however very proud that I stood up for myself and, because of that, I never got beat up again. I’m not going to advocate mindless violence for the sake of making yourself feel bigger at someone else’s expense, but hell, if you’re only two options are “Punch this bully in the face once” or “accept that you’re a victim and internalize your pain until it implodes on you”, guess what? I will plant my fist so hard into a bully’s face, his kids’ heads will be concave.

It gets better. That being said, sometimes you’re gonna have to get your hands dirty to make it better.

Like most faglets born into a hetero-normative society, it took me a while before I finally clued into the fact that I liked dong and chest hair more than vajooter and tits. That being said, I didn’t get around to that little nugget of info until I hit high school, which gave me seven wonderful, asexual years of platonic romance. Here’s to those six girls I gave my tiny, confused heart to in the years leading up to my coming out.

Lisa P.

Lisa was my very first “girlfriend”, if that’s what you’d call it. I chose Lisa as my girlfriend on my first day of Kindergarten, because she had the same name as Lisa from The Simpsons, and to my feeble little mind, I assumed that by dating Lisa P. I would be dating Lisa Simpson. I was fucking stupid as a kid.

Lisa had a thing for wearing sweaters that made her look like Shetland puppy, a blonde Dorothy Hamill bob, and pink capris. Years later, Robyn would fold all of these disparate elements into her own personal style. Her nose was constantly running like a goddamn faucet and had a habit if peeing herself, but more importantly, her parents were rich and the loot bags at her birthday parties were fucking insane. Seriously, one year they gave away something like fifty bajillion Pokemon cards. How sweet is that? Eventually, I was forced to dump her because she smelled like piss.

Lesson Learned: It doesn’t matter how gross someone is on the outside, as long as they have a ton of money.

Katherine with a K

After dumping Lisa P. halfway through Kindergarten, Katherine with a K swooped in like a vulture going in on a freshly run-over armadillo. Katherine was the first in a long line of fat girls I would “date” in elementary school. Before I go any further, I should probably mention that in St. John Fisher, hand-holding was roughly the pre-teen equivalent of getting to third-base. And holy shit, was Katherine with a K down to hold hands. In class, during nap time, waiting in line after recess to come back in… It was always hand-holding time with Katherine with a K. That being said, Katherine with a K was a total Vespa: Fun to ride, but not while anyone was looking. Not because she was fat, but because everyone thought that girls had cooties, which effectively made me patient zero. We slowly grew apart, and she started giving someone else her sweet, sweet hand-holding. Whoever that lucky man is, I salute you.

Lesson Learned: Fat chicks are great at hand-holding, and are ready and willing to do so whenever. They’re fucking troopers, they are.

Andrea

By the time we hit third grade, the other boys were starting to get the hint that pretty girls with blonde hair and tan skin and blue eyes were the ones you wanted to date. Enter Andrea, and all her Aryan beauty. Andrea was popular, cute, and a total bitch. After a brief hand-holding, she blew me off and started cycling through the most popular boys in the class, Brian, Jordan and Jesse, which made me jealous. Oddly, I was actually jealous of her, for reasons made clear in the future. Although she give all three of them head lice, so that wasn’t exactly any skin off my ass.

Lesson Learned: Pretty people will eventually give you “head lice”. That being said, it’ll be totally sweet because you’ll get to skip three whole days of school.

Stacey Perrerra

Stacey and I sat next to each other fourth grade, so it was only a matter of time before we became an item. Like Brad and Angelina, day-to-day exposure to each other fostered a sort of kindred connection between the two of us, like survivors clinging to flotsam in a sea of uncertainty and long division. Or is it jetsam? No, no, it was flotsam. I was right the first time. Flotsam it is.

Stacey was Armenian, so much like Kim Kardashian, she was about as naturally hirsute as a seventies gay porn star. She had a moustache that would have made Steve Cruz shit a brick, and her werewolf legs rivalled even mine. I can say this with a clear conscious because she ended up cheating on me with Matthew, the new kid who became a part of the Brian-Jordan-Jesse league of popularity.

Lesson Learned: A full, luscious moustache will make me go weak in the knees. Also, bitches will cheat on you.

Alexandra M.

To this day, I still proudly declare myself a gold-star gay. In fact, I’m so gold-star that I’ve never even made-out with a girl. That being said, Alexandra was the first person I ever “kissed”. Here’s the thing: Alexandra was part of a family that my own family was very close to. One day after school in the fifth grade, I was in Alexandra’s room checking out her Barbies when she leaned in and kissed me on the mouth.

And I felt nothing.

I had to explore this further. I scrunched up my face like I was trying to pass a kidney stone and mashed my face against her. To say that this was “a kiss” would be like saying that getting your dick caught in your zipper is “sex”. We had all the sexual energy of a vasectomy, with roughly the same amount of blood after she ended up head-butting me in the nose. Our brief fling began as quickly as it ended, as the two of us returned to playing Barbie. Barbie was the fucking best.

Lesson Learned: I did not, and do not, get anything out of kissing girls. Although like any good scientific theorum, I needed to recreate this scenario once more to make sure.

Cassandra Palangaw- Palangawiecz? Planagavich. Yes, Cassandra Palangavich.

In sixth grade, I started dating Cassandra Palangavich. Cassandra was pretty, sweet, funny, and had one of those Polish last names that looked like it was spelled by eating a can of alphabet soup and then wiping your ass with a birth certificate. Cassandra was one of my best friends, and we did absolutely everything together. During prom, I once again scrunched up my face and smooshed my puckered mouth against hers. Lo and behold, I felt nothing. The experiment had been repeated, and I ended up with the same results. After the “kiss”, we both promised to keep in touch with each other. Neither of us did, but at least we had fun while the time lasted.

Lesson Learned: I was gay. Also, that Vitamin C song is total bullshit. Friends forever? HA! Fuck right off, you will never talk to anyone you go to elementary school with.

So thank you, to all the girls I dumped or who dumped me. You taught me many valuable lessons, that I would later use in two failed relationships, and one successful one. If any of you ever come down to Toronto, let me know, I’ll buy you a drink.

(I’ve had this domain for a while now with no clue what to do with it, mostly because my tech guy bailed out on me. Although can you really bail on a ship you were never on? Possibly. The point is I’ve been staring at this blog for a while now, trying to figure out what the hell to do with it. After a long, thoughtful process, which took all of five minutes, I decided to just turn it into a creative writing space, a nice little respite from having to write about Lindsay Lohan and Spencer Fox all day. There’s a reason I don’t fear hell: Because I’m already here. Perhaps one day this will all be pulled together in one major anthology. Or maybe one day I’ll just write a book with 100 point font about my vagina. Hey, it got Chelsea Handler her own talk show, didn’t it?)

“Where do babies come from?”

I have yet to meet a single parent, custodian, or legal guardian who enjoys answering this question. It’s sort of like when your kid asks “Where do we go when we die?” or “Why do I look more like Mommy’s personal trainer than I do Daddy?” If you do it right, your kids becomes a normal member of society. Fuck it up, and your kid grows up to be one of those clowns with the bodies of half a dozen dead midget hookers stowed in their crawlspace.

It’s my personal experience that parents would gladly do anything other than talk to their kids about sex. Ask them to jump in front of a bullet for their kids? Abso-fucking-lutely. Drive them to hockey practice at 5:30 in the morning? They’ll do it every week. But the sex talk? Not a chance. All bets are off the moment you ask a parent to talk to their kids. They would rather run their genitals over a belt-sander than tell their kids about how they used those same genitals, a box of red wine, and a fear of dying alone to create a welfare check.

I mean a baby.

The first time I ever asked this question, my parents gave each other the old side-eye and muttered something along the lines of “storks bring ‘em, shut up.” It was the oh-so classic Irish gambit of suppressing anything awkward and uncomfortable in the hopes that it would just go away.

The wonderful thing about kids is that they’re stupid. Of course storks brought babies! It was a matter of Occam’s razor: Parents want babies, storks bring babies, done. That’s it. There was no way creating life involved a complicated series of combining genetics, DNA and chromosomes into a cell that gradually replicates itself into a sentient being. Fucking storks, man. Had to be fucking storks.

My knowledge of life-giving storks allowed me to rule over my preschool with an iron fist, one that was carefully wrapped in wool mittens safety-pinned to my five-inch thick jacket. I used my secret to as a bartering tool amongst my new subjects. Of course I would tell you where babies come from … for a price. Juice boxes, Play-Doh, finger paint … I sat atop my throne of perceived truth, the halls of Kirkland Tot’s Time my own personal kingdom. But every empire must fall eventually. My downfall came in the form of Joshua S.

“Storks don’t bring babies,” he said, punctuating his heresy by nonchalantly wiping a bulging, viscous green glob of snot on the sleeve of his Osh-Kosh B’Gosh.

“Yuh-huh, babies come from storks, ’cause my mommy and daddy said so, and you’re lying,” I said, my royal decree slightly undercut by both my lack of proper syntax, as well as the dried, sticky reside of juice all over my face.

“Nuh-uh, my parents told me where babies come from, and they said that it wasn’t storks.”

Clearly, something was rotten in the state of Pointe-Claire. My world was being turned upside-down. My parents wouldn’t lie to me! Babies came from storks because they had to. I decided to investigate further, just as soon as my mommy came to pick me up. Until then, I decided to play Fairy Godmother and Princess with my very first Fag Hag, Jessica C.

I was, of course, the Fairy Godmother.

Like Adam and Steve before me, I had been presented my own personal paradise, and I had been presented the offer to abandon it in the search for knowledge. And like Steve, I was about to listen to that lying, snotty cunt Joshua S. and take a big fucking bite out of the apple of where babies actually come from.

“Joshua S. said that his parents said that storks don’t bring babies,” I told my mother, as we stood in the hallway of the pre-school.

“That’s because Joshua’s mom is an alcoholic,” said my mother. “Storks bring babies. Let’s go home now, m’kay?”

“Not until you tell me where babies come from,” I said, trying to look as menacing as I could despite the fact that my numerous winter jackets made me look like an ewok.

“Storks. Storks bring them.”

At this point, I was furious. I backed her into a corner of the hallway and started wailing as loud as I could “WHERE DO BABIES COME FROM?!”

Cue the floodgates. “Whenamanandawomanloveeachotherverymuchthedaddystickshispenisinthemommyandlaysanegganditgrows
insideofherandninemonthslaterababycomesoutofhervagina!” she stage-whispered, somehow managing to compress the entire reproductive process down into one desperate, resentful hiss.

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

What the shit? Penis and vaginas and … No, seriously, what? How did that make any more sense than stupid-looking birds flying over live, screaming infants? Like fuck that happened. Didn’t she know that penises were for peeing? None of it made any sense whatsoever. But then again, my mom did say that was the case, and I was still at the stage in my life where anything my parents said was pure, unadulterated gospel. So babies now came from peeing in a lady.

That night over dinner, I sat at the table with my older brother, Jonathan, as my mother tried to feed my baby brother Anthony. Dad looked over at Jonathan and asked him if he had learned anything in Kindergarten that day. “Yeah, a friend told me that babies come from storks!” he said.

My mother immediately turned her attention to me, her eyes wide with fear. This was my chance. I had one opportunity to try out my revised logic, and by fuck I was going to go for it. “Babies don’t come from storks! We were all made when Daddy stuck his penis in Mommy and peed in her vagina and then we came out!”

Pin drop. My parents looked at me like I had just told my brother that I was going to stab him in the head, and Jonathan looked at me with a look that suggested, and would later be confirmed, he had just shit his pants.

And thus marked the end of my kingdom of truthiness. My parents made me promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone else where babies come from. Not that they needed to, anyway. I mean for shit’s sake, babies coming out of pee-filled vaginas? HA! Like that would ever happen.

Sooooo, I might sorta kinda have a boyfriend. I think.

I started seeing someone after I got back home from L.A. and for the past two weeks, we’ve been having little nights out. His name Paul, but his pup name is Argo, and to be honest, Argo is a way cooler name than Paul. So he’s named Argo now. We go out for dinner, watch movies and order pizza… He even took me to see my first drag show ever. On a side note: Daytona Bitch, on the off-chance you’re reading this, sorry for nearly killing you with that chair. I hope the $5 tip offsets that, although I really don’t know how much you’re supposed to tip at these things. Is that enough, or too little? They really need to make these things clearer.

Where was I? Oh yes, my new possible boyfriend. Since we met at Pup Night two weeks ago, we’ve been getting to know each other, both personal and “bow-chicka-wah-wow” sense of the term. But this morning, he popped the question:

“So, would you say we’re dating?”

And thus, I was given the opportunity to DTR. If you’ve never watched Awkward. (which you should, because the show is surprisingly shrewd and hilarious for something on MTV) DTR stands for “Define the relationship”. It’s that moment in a new possible relationship where you have to set the terms and conditions before you move on. It should not be confused with “DTF”, which means “Down to fuck”. That part of the relationship is a little less special.

I had a choice: I could either ditch my single-minded hatred of relationships and take a chance on him, or give up on something that could potentially be cool just because I was afraid of watching it end. Given the wording, you can probably see which direction I took on that one.

“I think we might be dating.”

Could I have said that with less conviction?

But so it was solidified. Argo and I were… kinda sorta might be dating. Yes, I’m not exactly diving into the deep end, but dipping my toe into the waters still counts as a step in the right direction. I already tried rushing one relationship, and that ended up with me doing the whole “Oh I’m so in lovey lovey lovey WUV muah muah muah pfffffffffft.” Christ, is there anything worse than a couple who pours on the saccharine affection like fake maple syrup over toaster pancakes? Stab me with a fucking spoon. If I ever turn back into one of those a-holes who talks about how he “wuvs his hubby” or defines himself entirely by who he’s dating, please point me in the direction of where I left my balls.

That’s what I like about Argo. He knows that I’m never going to be one of those snivelling little boys who sits around all day while he does all the work, and he knows I’m not going to remain attached at the hip with him at all times, and I’m not going to use him for anything other than being around him. It’s a weird thing to describe, but the best way I can put this is that I need to need him and not need him simultaneously. He knows that about me, and I know that about him. I need my individuality and our togetherness at the same time. It’s a weird dichotomy, I know, but I like weird dichotomies.

That being said, I do care for Argo, and yes, I’m willing to let that care simmer for now until it starts developing into more major feelings. And I promise not to bombard you guys with pictures of us being all perfect and happy in Disney World or wherever the fuck insufferable couples go to prove to the world that they’re in love in order to silence the nagging voice in their heads reminding them that they’re going to break up anyway. See? Even when I’m in lesbians with a guy, I can still be a first-rate cunt.

A year ago today, I had just been fired from one of my dream jobs, I had just come off of one of the most hostile Christmases ever, and was completely alone in a new city all while staring down the barrel of unemployment.

Today, I’m the co-producer, co-anchor and head writer of my own TV show, I have my own column, I was welcomed into close-knit community, I have over $10,000 saved up to put a down payment on my own place, and I pissed off Paris Hilton enough to warrant an email from her lawyers.

At the risk of turning this blog post into an “It Gets Better” video, this kind of a turn in the opposite direction.

I always viewed New Year’s Eve as this night of at best misguided hope, where everyone would look back on the year that past and say, “Man, what a shithole that turned out to be. But not this one! I can feel it!” You may recognize that as the phrase people use just before scratching off their next instant lottery ticket.

But every once in a while, the universe lobs you a softball.

I was extremely fortunate this year, make no mistake. 2011 could have just as easily ended with me moving back in with my parents, working dead-end jobs and living in bland comfort. Granted, it also could have ended with me dead, disfigured, or married to an octopus, but that’s just what happens when you assume that there are an infinite amount of universes each created from the infinite number of possible actions one can take at any given moment. Point is, like Abed grabbing the airborne die in that one episode of Community where they went all quantum physics on us, I took a stab in the dark and ended up in the best timeline possible. Which is great, because I really did not want to end up in the darkest timeline with Evil Troy and Evil Abed. I can’t work a goatee.

I promise, this next paragraph will contain far less esoteric nerd humor.

I’m sure a few of you were wondering what I meant when I said that Paris Hilton’s lawyers sent a cease and desist over something I wrote. Here’s the deal with that:

It’s the end of the year, which means the news is RIDICULOUSLY slow. As a gossip blogger, this means you have to make due with what you have, up to and including acknowledging the fact that Vienna Girardi exists. One item that floated in was a bit from TMZ about how Paris Hilton was spotted getting out of a car with a “suspicious looking white powder” in a non-stick, flat, black basin.

I would like to take this opportunity to clarify: I am absolutely not saying that the “suspicious looking white powder” was cocaine or any other form of illegal narcotics. Because that would just be cuh-razy! I mean really… Paris Hilton doing drugs? That statement is absolutely ludicrous! Guffaw indeed! Oh dear, it seems I laughed so hard my monocle fell into my champaign flute. How gauche!

Not pictured: Any cocaine whatsoever (Via TMZ).

You see, the mysterious white powder was actually make-up! What I think happened is this: Paris is very busy these days, what with her thriving career and all, so she doesn’t have time to apply her make-up at home! Instead, she does it all in her moving car. And sometimes, her make-up spills specifically into a dark, dry basin, which is sort of a blessing in disguise because it allows her to see all the make-up she spilled. But of course, ever the fastidious cleaner, Paris shapes into four lines for easy clean-up later when she finds the world’s tiniest swiffer.

Of course, at the time I didn’t believe, but thankfully, her lawyers were there to set me straight by sending my editor a cease and desist email! We deleted the post right away, and not a moment too soon either! My careless actions would have made it seem like Paris Hilton was doing coke, and as we all know, Paris Hilton doesn’t do drugs.

But in all seriousness here, Paris Hilton can spread butter on my butt and take a bite (actually, please don’t do that; I don’t know where that mouth has been.) At this point, she should be thankful anyone’s even willing to cede the fact that she’s still alive. And I mean really, if I can piss Paris Hilton off enough that her lawyer is sending me a cease and desist, I’ve done something right here. This may be my proudest moment ever. I’m going to see if I can get MK to send me the email so I can print it out, have it framed, and then hang it in my living room for all the world to see!

Happy New Year’s, everyone!