There’s a lot of quality free reading material available to you on the T. Of course, you’ve got your daily Metro. I get a lot of grief from people who want Metro to be some kind of subversive samizdat publication calling for the overthrow of order and complete anarchy, but come on. Settle down. It’s what it is. And it’s perfectly fine for what it is. It’s your commute to work. Do you really want to be enraged or plunged into the depths of despair by your reading material at that early hour? And then what? Go to your cubicle and cry your eyes out?
But I sympathize. My aim in writing op eds for Metro is to get the blood pumping in the morning. Nothing more, nothing less. For those of you who desire titillation on the T, I wrote about sex ed in Tuesday’s issue (you can read it here, if you missed it).
Speaking of sex, the latest issue of Bay Windows, the free paper for the GLBTETC community has a good article by Ethan Jacobs on the Mr. Heterosexual pageant held Feb. 18 at Worcester’s Mechanics Hall, “part of an evangelical Christian event purportedly celebrating ‘God’s design’ of heterosexuality.” I would personally like to remind you all that God himself is not heterosexual. As far as I am aware God has neither sex nor sexuality. Abiogenesis and biopoiesis, both of which seek to show that reproducing organisms originated from non-reproducing elements, which, by the way, jibes with the Genesis account, argue that it took God a good long time to think outside the box as far as propogation is concerned. This suggests that God is probably a giant amoeba. I mean, amoebas don’t sit around all day thinking of sexual reproduction like the rest of us do, do they?
The Dig’s Michael Brodeur also crashed the Mr. Small-Penis Latent Homosexual Pageant, and lived to tell about it.
And of course the Dig’s got “Oh Cruel World,” and is always worth picking up for that alone. The Dig’s also got my current favorite comic, the delightful Lulu Eightball By Emily Flake:
The Phoenix has Hockney’s take on Divine on the front page, advertising the Hockney show at the MFA. Nobody from the Phoenix was at Mechanics Hall. But the Phoenix has Dan Savage of the syndicated “Savage Love” (which is almost as good as “Oh Cruel World,” and is my other weekly “must read”), and this week’s column has a letter from a dude who certainly could have been there. He wants to know if Enzyte for “natural male enhancement” really works.
He writes: “Not that I’m small or anything, but I’m a divorced, middle-aged, chain-smoking, overweight single guy who lives in a trailer park. I’d love to land a normal woman but don’t know what to do. I figure a few more inches downstairs wouldn’t hurt, especially if all I have to do is take a pill every day.” Now, ain’t that America? And what’s this “a few extra inches”? How many do you need? It’s either really small in that case, or you’re planning to use it as a lasso.
The savage Savage savagely answers: “Guys: the pills don’t work, the surgery doesn’t work — nothing works. There ought to be a law against advertising ‘cures’ for small dicks. It’s cruel and it discourages miserable, small-dicked men from the only real cure for their unhappiness: acceptance.” Ouch.
Of course, I don’t have this problem personally, but I think a more constructive bit of advice for this dude would have been to point him to this here website for sufferers of “penis phobia.” Just hook up with one of them. Presumably fear of something small would be less than fear of something large. Sometimes small ugly things are even cute (whereas big ugly things are just plain ugly, and menacing to boot). This could be a therapeutic match made in heaven.