TKM

It was without question the nicest doctor’s office I have ever entered. Spare, spacious, and moodlit with rice-paper tower lamps and recessed lights. Four semi-lounge chairs invited clients to settle in and relax with a magazine—Glamour, Allure, Sunset, Wine Spectator—as if one were poolside on a Princess cruise. These reading choices, no doubt selected for their idle browsability, were neatly arrayed on a sturdy coffee table, which itself was centered on an Oriental rug, a real one, not one of those winking acrylic imposters at IKEA that start shedding red fuzz all over your living room 10 minutes after you lay it down. Twelve-inch ocean-colored marbled tile subtly offset soft white walls whose hushed serenity was broken only by three oil paintings bursting with bright colors and a flat-screen TV wall-mounted above a table of brochures advertising Cynosure, Juvéderm, Restylane, and Latisse, the latter of which, I learned, is a treatment for eyelash hypotrichosis, a chilling term for the relatively nonmalignant condition of short eyelashes.

While the wife and I have a DVR and enjoy our ability to fast-forward through commercials—thereby helping to kill the time-honored model of sponsor-driven television we’ve known our entire lives—whenever I see an advertisement flitting by for a pharmaceutical I’ve never heard of I make her back up, because I find novel drugs and their ads tragicomic in a complacently American way. That’s how I learned of the possible side effects of Latisse, whose first-line application is as a glaucoma treatment—we all knew that no scientists actually set out to “cure” short eyelashes; clinicians simply noticed that glaucoma patients who were taking Lumigan, the alter ego of Latisse, to decrease ocular hypertension, which sounds way more painful to me than eyelash hypotrichosis, developed darker pigment in and around their eyes, which made for thicker, longer lashes. Now, look alive, this hyper eyelash growth is not a permanent side effect; eyelash hypotrichosis is as chronic as disappointment and will reassert its bad ass the moment you discontinue use. However, the potential darkening of your iris pigment is likely permanent, so, you know, if the eyes are windows to the soul, your soul will become darker too. Permanently. Just saying. Heaven knows I’m a major consumer of pharma. Still, it seems excessive to me—especially in a world visited by the miracle of mascara—to take a prescription medication for the rest of your life, at a cost of $120 per month, to maintain slightly longer eyelashes, but that’s probably only because I dodged the eyelash hypotrichosis bullet. My eyelashes are quite long. And my irises are already plenty brown.

I could go on about the injectible wrinkle fillers that were on offer, like Juvéderm, Restylane, and Radiesse, any of which promise to usurp your unsightly nasolabial folds (a.k.a. smile lines), melomental folds (creases emanating from the corners of your mouth, or “marionette lines” in aesthetician parlance), crow’s feet, or just about any other mark of a life well-lived—for about six to nine months, after which your body absorbs it and your face resumes its natural joyful state. But one must put her judgmental opinions about necessity and excess aside when entering the previously alien dimension of plastic surgery and injectible/pharmaceutical cosmetology. I was there for the former, or at least for a consult about the former. And it wasn’t just some random plastic surgeon’s den of solicitude. I was in the surgical cosmetology capital of the world, Beverly Hills’ “Golden Triangle” neighborhood, so named for the obscene consumerism and self-righteous privilege that radiate from its Rodeo Drive nucleus like the seductive, combustible rays of the sun. Touch me, skanks.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember, as hard as they’ve tried to forget, that my girls developed in a free-spirited, artistic way, with one big, floppy D-cup accompanied by a little sister two full cup sizes her junior. I would more plainly call this a developmental deformity, but I don’t want yonier-than-thou feminists all up in my grill for not embracing the perfection of my temple. On the contrary, I mask my goddess-given uniqueness, augmenting my dwarfish side with a prosthetic to approximate a chest that fails to alarm strangers.

Though I long ago stepped up from the nylon-covered foam pad of my youth—which had to be surreptitiously wrung out whenever I was so bold as to go swimming—to a silicone insert that conducts at nearly the same bounce rate as its mate when I walk and feels less like a wadded sock to those who hug me, it’s still uncomfortable and prone to slippage, and I’m tired of stealing moments for furtive adjustments. If I were less self-conscious I suppose I could adjust it more brazenly, like men shifting their merchandise in the deli window, but I’m afraid I could never summon up enough attitude to make that maneuver seem like anything but a lonely lesbian awkwardly groping her own tits.

In truth, I’ve just never taken pride of ownership in my chest; inasmuch as I think about my breasts at all, it’s mostly about how to camouflage them—or how much I’d like to not have to think about camouflaging them. I’ve been dreaming about corrective surgery since I was a teenager, but it’s not the kind of procedure one’s HMO covers—I’ve certainly tried to convince mine that they should—and it’s always been beyond the means of my pitifully stagnant income. But lately, catching a draft off the success of my overeducated wife—who has generously begun to cover a larger share of our household expenses with her more dynamic salary—I’ve found myself with greater financial freedom. So, totally taking advantage of my wife’s largesse, I’m blowing my newfound savings on plastic surgery. Good thing I don’t look like a trophy wife. (Give me time: My nasolabial and melomental folds are only getting deeper.)

So why lop off the big boob instead of augmenting the little one? Augmentation is, after all, less expensive, less invasive, and far less scarring—a state of affairs I find corrupt; how else to explain this being one of very few instances in which women are encouraged to want more, and punished for wanting less. I’m sorry, but if surgeons have figured out how to insert and secure 1-kilogram silicone slabs through straw-sized incisions tucked discreetly under the arms, how have they not yet stumbled on a way to decrease breast mass without cutting off our nipples and slicing down and around the mammary like they’re skinning and de-boning chicken breasts?

Still, I do want less. It’s true that as an adolescent I tried exercising only on the right side to increase the breast muscle of my stunted member. It didn’t work. At all. Probably owing to the fact that breasts are composed of milk ducts and fat, neither of which much respond to exercise.  As an adult, well, my personal presentation can be somewhat at odds with itself, with a pronounced disconnect between my chosen aesthetic and my unchosen mammatude; even as my breasts may well be the only characteristic of prove-it-in-your-face womanhood that keeps me from being bounced out of ladies’ restrooms, I’m tired of them lording their bounty over me like some sick cosmic joke.

And isn’t it a wonderful thing that modern medicine has given us ways to “correct” just about anything we find disharmonious to our own big ideas about how we feel we should, want, or deserve to look? (For a staggering fee, the indirect costs of which will be passed along to my wife; good thing I married her when I had the chance.)

I’m tempted here to address the issue of misguided plastic surgery. There are plenty of people who manage to incorrect themselves in their bitchfight with nature, even people who, by virtue of having had, say, a dozen or two or three surgical procedures in their quest to micromanage their genetic code, find themselves featured on A&E, which has lately found its niche in dwelling on the addictions and obsessive compulsions of Americans gripped by PTSD, dysphoria, or even simple ennui. But who am I to say that my boob job is somehow more meritorious than that of the 110-pound 21-year-old who knows in her heart that she was really meant to have F-cup breasts? And if her newfound “self-esteem” opens avenues previously closed to her—like maybe the gates of the Playboy Mansion in Bel-Air…

Or even the stage door at San Bernardino’s Flesh gentlemen’s bar…

Well, then bully for her!

One can look up any number of websites that have little purpose beyond tracking plastic surgery disasters, generally of the celebrity variety because, really, how many uncelebrated people are going to emerge from anonymity simply to say, “Wow, look at this horrifying ‘after’ shot of me! I’m not sure what I was going for, but I sure ended up disfigured!”

Hence, the old saying is particularly applicable here: I didn’t want to just pick somebody out of the phonebook. Not that anybody uses phonebooks anymore. My wife and I occasionally receive a copy of the yellow pages but haven’t cracked one open in years, and when we recently found a white pages volume lying on the doorstep we were momentarily fascinated by the relic, as if an IBM Selectric typewriter had been mysteriously delivered to our side porch.

Needless to say, I had not started my search in the yellow pages. Rather, I asked a transgender professor at my wife’s institution of higher learning whether he could recommend any local plastic surgeons, figuring that surgeons who regularly do “top” surgeries for trans dudes would have no trouble whatsoever with the level of reduction/reconstruction I have in mind.

I had been harboring some concern that maybe someone who spends so much time thinking about breasts—defying mass-to-perk physics ratios, discerning ideal nipple placement, defining perfect cleavage plumb lines—would try to talk me into, if not a straight-up augmentation on the wee side, meeting somewhere in the middle of the two, perhaps at a nice, plump C? Like maybe there’s a whole cadre of surgeons involved in a secret fraternal organization foresworn to protect the worldwide breast population from fallen women like me, like a sort of Operation Rescue for boobs. I didn’t want any contention with my surgeon about desired outcomes, because at a certain critical point in this transaction I’ll be out cold on a table and at the mercy of the surgeon’s mammipulations.

Trans dude having come up empty, I went to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons website, where you can search doctors by surgery type, ZIP Code, etc. I chose “breast reconstruction” and selected a 10-mile radius as my parameter. It returned 194 hits, about 150 of which sported Golden Triangle addresses. Even I can’t believe there’s that much call for boobwork by Angelenos, and I’ve lived among their peculiar breed my whole life.

Daunted, I had to narrow my search down somehow, and of the 194 doctors only a handful had recognizably female names, so I started with them, guessing I was less likely to encounter pushback from a female surgeon. The “patient care consultant” for the first doctor I contacted was friendly and incredibly responsive to follow-up e-mails—though the surgeon’s consultation fee seemed a bit on the absurd precious side. Given that, before setting up a first date I wanted to have a reasonable expectation that we were going to get to second base; I didn’t want to fork over $250 taking a surgeon to dinner only to find that she didn’t want to go to bed with me, or that she had a tacky, shedding IKEA rug. When I expressed concerns to patient care consultant Sonya about whether or not the surgeon and I might be on the same results page, or living in the same financial universe, she invited me to e-mail photos of my breasts, front and profiles, for a preliminary look-see and quote.

Enter dear wife for weirdest photo shoot ever.

You know how you sometimes look at pictures of yourself and say, “Jesus, do I really look like that?” That feeling is amplified in naked photos. I sincerely didn’t think it was possible for me to harbor more dislike for that particular portion of my body, but as I sat editing images of my dysmorphic chest, cropping out all references to my head and happy trail, I couldn’t imagine how I had managed to look past it for so long. Have I had carnival mirrors all this time?

I sent the images to Sonya, resisting the urge to apologize in the body of the e-mail. I’m certain that mine isn’t the first set of amateur, anonymous, totally unsexy naked pics Sonya has been sent, nor will it be the last.

I wonder if guys surfing for free online porn ever look at before-and-after shots of breast augmentations. There seems to be an endless supply out there—most categorized by cup size, which can be pretty handy for the discerning breast man. To get an idea of what my reduction would look like, I had to use the “before” and “after” shots in reverse, flipping, for instance, A-to-D and B-to-D augmentations. This was annoying because I wanted to see an actual surgically enhanced breast in the size I was shopping for: These ragtag A’s and B’s were all just as prolapsed as mine, with none of the lifting and smoothing and precision nipplescaping that I’m hoping for in a finished product. I couldn’t find a single site that pictured a woman who had undergone a reduction with an end-point size below a C cup. Is there really no demand for such a result? Do surgeons just not post those pics because they don’t want to scare away clientele who may be worried about having too much of their womanhood slurped out while comatose? Or are the surgeons members of Operation Brescue?

Knowing that most women get reductions in order to relieve neck and back pain, the scope of these reductions seem startlingly minor to me, sometimes sloughing just a partial cup size. And pictures I’ve found depicting disparity corrections suggest that women overwhelmingly opt for an overall augmentation, with implants of differing sizes equalizing the imbalance. At the end of the day, it seems, everybody wants more, not less. Even kittens.

The online transmission of my own “cheesecake” pics—which felt weird enough; I can’t imagine e-mailing a naked picture of myself with my head attached. I guess that’s what separates me from the TMI generation, who gamely engage in sexting and then seem genuinely surprised when, post-breakup, their ex-boyfriends disseminate the nudie shots to anyone with a cell phone. Gah, I clearly wrote FYEO right there in the subject line!

But now I guess I know how those girls feel. I received no further correspondence from Sonya, not even when I followed up five days later to ask whether the doctor had had a chance to view the pics, adding, solicitously, “Now that I’ve decided to give myself this gift, I’m very excited to move forward with it.”

Nope. Nothing. Sonya may at this very moment be sending pictures of my tits to her entire e-mail address book. Subject line: OMG, so FUBAR!

But I wouldn’t let Sonya’s rejection dissuade me. I simply moved on to girlfriend doctor number two, who seemed more qualified than the last anyway, carrying board certification in both surgery and plastic surgery; her office asked for the less precious consultation fee of $125. And her patient care consultant, Nadia, informed me that a patient had just canceled an appointment two weeks out and would I like to see the doctor then? Yes, I really, really would!

Which brings us back to me, sitting in a semi-lounge chair in a moodlit office not reading a fluffy magazine, surrounded by brochures for injectible cosmetic enhancements, waiting for my name to be called, hoping this doctor would be the one.

To be continued…

I had a dream last night that our home was infested with giant cockroaches that I could not kill. They were too smart and agile to stomp on, and spraying them with Raid only pissed them off. In sharp contrast to the other dream I remember from last night, in which my supervisor told me I should definitely ask for a $20,000 raise and that he’d make sure I got it, the cockroach dream was one of sheer terror.

I’ve never thought twice about stomping cockroaches when I see them in our detached garage; if I let them live out there, I figure, it’s just a matter of time before they’ll ask to come inside. And actually, they won’t ask.

Spiders, on the other hand, I’ve always treated with a kind, if not downright welcoming, manner. When I see one in the house I generally go find a newspaper or Dixie cup to gently scoop it up so that I can release it into the backyard. If you’re a bit of an arachnophobe and don’t want to get quite that close to the little guy, here’s a transfer gadget that probably breaks when you look at it funny.

Me, I don’t even bother depositing spiders far from the house; I just open the door and set them down to make their merry way where they will. There are times when I see a spider far up the bathroom wall and think, Meh, let it be, but that’s usually because it just seems like too much trouble to go get a stepstool. I may even feel a little lazy or guilty in those instances because I know that the spider needs insect prey to survive—I really ought to put it outside where it can thrive, but again, I have to go get the stepstool.

Concern for insects’ nutritional needs, I’ve recently learned, is not a personal quirk. On Friday night my wife and I went to see Cheryl Wheeler play live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, where Wheeler asked whether anyone in the audience followed her practice in hotel rooms whereby when she encounters a fly and can’t manage to shoo it out a window or door, she goes to the vending machine to buy it something to eat—usually a granola bar—because she worries that it will starve in the sparse confines of a hotel room. I adore Cheryl Wheeler.

I have to admit that I kill indoor flies, and even outdoor ones if they get to be a nuisance on the patio. Choosing a fly-control method is its own nuisance. I’ve always thought of fly strips as trashy and bug zappers as cruel, so last summer we purchased a trap that you load with bait-infused water; flies enter for the delicious attractant (which smells like sewer water, but no one ever accused fecal-dwelling flies of having good taste), find themselves unable to escape, and drown in the water. That’s cruel too, I realize, but it was one of the few truly effective solutions out there (said online knowers) that I thought wouldn’t be gross to look at and handle. Besides, at least the poor fellas would have a good meal before they died.

I was wrong about the not-gross part. As the dead flies collected in the reservoir they became a liquefied pool of death, and if I was tardy in emptying the container—for which I wore a dust mask and Playtex gloves—maggots would begin to spawn in the death pool. It was, frankly, one of the most disgusting tasks I’ve ever been forced to confront.

This summer, with due diligence, I discovered (through other online knowers) a not-at-all-gross fly deterrent that seems to work pretty well. Apparently, the crap-eating, garbage-loving, maggoty little beasts despise basil. Enter basil plant on patio. Not so much trouble with the flies this year, though I’ll admit to some suspicion that the enormous number of flies trapped on our patio last season was in part a result of the trap’s bait attracting more flies to our patio.  At any rate, even if our relatively fly-free summer wasn’t really about the basil, the plant smells great and can be useful in cooking besides. Win-win.

But the question remains, why so hostile toward flies and cockroaches while kind toward spiders and “cute” insects like butterflies and ladybugs? There’s a good argument to be made for usefulness to the environment. Spiders control insect populations, butterflies help pollinate gardens, and ladybugs eat aphids, a common garden pest (in the 1980s, after Southern California was blanketed with several cycles of overnight malathion spraying via crop planes to control a fruit fly infestation, ladybugs also disappeared, after which aphids ran rampant in household gardens and commercial orchards; when humans mess with shit, other shit gets messed up).

Flies and cockroaches, on the other hand, are omnivorous refuse dwellers who spread germs and disease. That’s probably why we have a superhero called Spider-Man and not one called Cockroach-Man.

Sing it with me: “Cockroach-Man, Cockroach-Man, does whatever a cockroach can!”

But eating garbage is purposeful, and we humans produce an awful lot of it. We also happen to be omnivorous consumers who efficiently spread germs and disease. So we either discriminate against flies and cockroaches because they’re ugly (and we’re shallow) or because we’re competitively jealous.

Consider the cockroach, which can survive for up to a month without food, up to 45 minutes without air, and up to 30 minutes underwater. It can slow down its heart rate at will and can withstand up to 15 times the amount of radiation that would be lethal to the average person. It is one of the fastest insects (or animals) on the planet, clocking speeds of 50 body lengths per second, the equivalent of a human running 205 miles per hour. And unlike their relatively short-lived insect pals, a cockroach can live for up to a year.

The housefly, by contrast, lives only 15 to 30 days, but what it lacks in life quality it makes up for in reproductive quantity, with the ability to lay up to 500 eggs during a single cycle—oh, and females reach sexual maturity at 36 hours old. Here’s a couple of flies getting some.

Houseflies are really anything but common: They can walk on walls and ceilings and, of course, they can fly, all feats of storied human fantasy. They’re also pure ninjas. Professor Michael Dickinson of the California Institute of Technology released a study in 2008 revealing that a fly’s brain is able to anticipate a threat, calculate the angle of attack, and evade the maneuver in the course of 100 milliseconds. Though Dickinson has an affinity for flies owing to their technical talents and claims that he personally never swats them, his research has at last given humans’ fly-swatting technique game.

Given all that potential, Dickinson might ask, what’s not to like about the housefly—except for the fact that they constantly vomit and deposit fecal matter on household surfaces?

It’s not like spiders are Polly Perfect. Some of them bite, as I was reminded Thursday night when I couldn’t get comfortable in bed and discovered an irritated red bump on my rump. I’m fine now, thanks. Apparently it wasn’t a brown recluse spider, a species whose bites can kill you dead. I would post a picture here of an advanced BRS bite, but I don’t want to ugly up my blog that much—and I say that having posted that cockroach picture. But go ahead, take a moment now to look up “brown recluse spider bite” in Google images, then try to come back and not hate on me.

The good news is that, as implied by their name, brown recluse spiders don’t so much like people…or other animals or insects for that matter—they prefer to scavenge for dead insects rather than live prey. But they take up residence in dark, undisturbed spaces like attics and basements, and they hunt for food far from their webs—which they use for nesting, not trapping—and tend to take temporary refuge during hunting expeditions in bedding and such. So while they would just as soon not come in contact with humans, and humans would way rather not come in contact with them, the opportunities during which we might meet each other unexpectedly are rife—and then they try to kill us.

My spider bite has proven unfatal thus far. Still, I feel utterly betrayed. After all that not-killing, some spider up and bites me on the ass. It was probably one of those that I saw in the house and ignored—now starving because I killed all its flies—and if the bite wasn’t enough to get my attention, now the little fucker is sending giant cockroaches to haunt my dreams. A fitting retribution, I imagine, for our delineation of good insect from bad, beautiful from ugly, friend from nuisance, welcome guest from marked for death.

We’re getting a goat!

Not me and my wife—our property isn’t zoned for hooved animals. Probably not horned animals either. Wait, are there any horned animals who don’t have hooves? Horns and paws? Or claws? I know we’re zoned for clawed animals because of the cannibalistic KFC-eating chicken from across the street.

No, we’ll be keeping our goat in Rwanda under the stewardship of my sister Valerie Mukamana, who has made real my 3½-year-old wish to effect positive change in someone’s life through the awesomely powerful gift of livestock.

Those who have read my blog for some length of time may recall posts about my first two Rwandan sisters, here and here. We were matched via Women for Women International, an organization through which I’ve been delighted to discover that, somewhere, my measly monthly contribution of $27 can still be parlayed into something more than three lunches at Baja Fresh.

To recap, on my drive to work one morning in March 2006, I heard an NPR story about a neighborhood association near Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, that functioned as a kind of emotional support and financial aid clinic for women who survived the 1994 genocide. The listener’s window into the story was Nehrama Jambare Alphonsein, who was raped by a machete-wielding Hutu supremacist and contracted HIV as a result. At the time of the NPR story, Nehrama, then 20—she was 9 at the time of the genocide, during which raping prepubescent girls was less a matter of sexual gratification than it was just another weapon of war—was raising three children, all of whom were orphans of the mass slaughter and one of whom was born with HIV.

Compounding those circumstances, many families, including Nehrama’s, mourn openly for sons killed in the genocide yet consider the raping of their daughters a matter of great family shame and therefore a taboo topic, leaving them without healing emotional outlets.

Like many Americans, my primary lens on the genocide was Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, and as with many such nonfiction accounts of chilling, seemingly impossible human violence, I felt impotent on finishing it, like I had little recourse but to shudder and move on.

But that morning I heard Nehrama speak of her daily visits to a neighborhood organization, located an hour’s walk from her home, where women with similar experiences shared amongst themselves without fear of judgment or stigma.

And then she spoke of her goats.

She had six of them, all bred from a source goat the neighborhood association had given her to help raise her family’s standard of living beyond the subsistence they were eking out cultivating beans and potatoes on a rented plot of land. Mind you, Nehrama’s family still lived in a mud hut with no electricity or running water, but I was cheered by her success with animal husbandry—in that NPR-listener way made up of equal parts idealism and guilt, leaving us with a powerful need to believe that, however sad, everything we hear about turns out fine in the end—and I was certain that Nehrama’s growing herd would soon turn her fortunes around.

Ha! Get it? Growing herd? Heh.

How much are goats? I wondered. And how could I buy one for a woman like Nehrama?

I didn’t want to ship a goat, of course—that’s just crazy talk—so when I got to work I set about trying to find an association online like the one discussed, and that’s how I found Women for Women International, an organization dedicated to helping women in war and postwar regions rebuild their lives through a scholarship program addressing basic needs, civil rights education, life and work skills, and community leadership roles. Neato! And best of all, I could sponsor a Rwandan woman directly. I would receive a picture and profile at the beginning of our relationship, as well as a report on how she felt her circumstances had improved at the end of our year together, and in the meantime we could swap letters so that I could hear all about her exciting new life raising goats!

Yeah, well, suck it, NPR idealist. Go sell your goats somewhere else. Your Rwandan sisters had crafts to do.

My first two sisters, in exit interviews at the completion of the yearlong scholarship, both said they had gained much from the program: Each were unemployed at the start but were now self-employed. Each said their general housing conditions and health had improved, and that they had gained self-confidence and knowledge of their civil rights. All of which is GREAT. But both, when asked what skills training they had undertaken, said “Knitting.”

There’s nothing wrong with knitting, of course. Some of my best friends knit (well, one of my online friends anyway, and she’s the partner of someone who might read this, and could probably kick my ass, so I want to make sure I cover it). And because I just started to feel like kind of an asshole for being disappointed in my sisters’ knitting pursuits, I Googled Rwandans and knitting and found an organization called, well, Rwanda Knits, which says of itself, “Our program enables [Rwandan women] to increase their incomes through economically sustainable knitting cooperatives, through which they produce garments for their domestic market and export markets.” Right, like I said, knitting was a very sensible and lucrative pursuit on my sisters’ part. Besides, how can you argue with the mad skills of clinic instructor Faina?

Still, faced with a choice between working with yarn and farm animals, well, I was just hoping they would go for a nice dairy goat who would provide milk and cheese and perhaps even precious hours of amusement for the children. Not that I’m trying to tell anyone what to do with their scholarship opportunities. Or maybe I am a little, but I entered the sisterhood with a mission, and a little over $1,100 later we were still goatless. I just did a quick price check at GoatFinder.com (I know!) and discovered that goat kids start at $65—and that’s for a pedigreed, “show quality” goat sold in American dollars. Here’s a nubian kid from my new favorite site ZooBorns:

Spectacular nubian kids named Polka Dot aside, I reckon random goats bought with Rwandan francs cost a lot less.

However disappointed with the intransigence of the knitters (that just reminded me of the Knitters, the country project by members of X and the Blasters, and I wondered whether their 1985 album Poor Little Critter on the Road had ever been issued on CD, and not only has it, I found, but they put out an album in 2005 that I didn’t even know about; free association rocks!), I shouldered on to be matched with a third sister, which is where Valerie Mukamana comes in.

Valerie said in her entrance interview that she had received no schooling and could neither read nor write more than her name—differing from my other sisters, who had both attended primary school. Each of them had sent me cards and letters during our time together, telling me about their children and husbands, asking me about my children and my husband, and asking, if it’s not too much trouble, could I possibly send a picture? (This latter wish has gone unmet; I’ve been uncomfortable with the idea of revealing my sexual orientation to my sisters, fearing emotional rejection—it is the only part of my life in which I am closeted.)

Valerie, who has a husband and five kids and, like Nehrama, said they all live in a hut with no electricity or running water, also rated her family’s general health as poor and said they rarely can access medical treatment. Of all my sisters so far, Valerie seemed in the direst straits, so I was pleased to be matched with her. But I also consciously put aside my goat obsession for another year, thinking that even if she happened to receive livestock, I wouldn’t hear about it given her inability to correspond with me.

But then, earlier this month, I did receive a letter from Valerie. Had she dictated it to someone? Had she been a superstar in the literacy program? She wasn’t telling. Instead she told me that she had started selling bananas and tomatoes at the local market to help generate income and that she hoped her family could soon upgrade from their hut to an iron-sheeted house. She said that they had not been receiving many rains and asked whether we had been receiving any here. And, of course, she wondered about my own family and asked, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I please send a picture?

She also wrote this: “I am hoping to buy a goat and other domestic animals so that I can fight against poverty.” (!)

I would go to Rwanda right now to help Valerie pick it out, but I just checked Travelocity and it looks like flights to Kigali start at $2,500—that’s with three stops and two plane changes. As much as I’d like to meet Valerie and her new goat, it seems criminal to spend potential seed money for 38 goats to do so.

Plus, my wife just told me that if she’s going to the African continent, there are a couple, three countries, maybe 10, that would be higher on her list of must-visits than Rwanda. Go ahead, try to tell her Botswana can’t possibly be as entertaining as it seems in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (but, OMG, if you haven’t watched the HBO series, Netflix it now).

So, instead of sending myself, I’m going to have to be content with sending a letter, telling Valerie that we haven’t been receiving many rains in Southern California either. Perhaps I’ll disclose to this third sister that I have no children, but that I gained a wife last year when I married my partner of 14 years; maybe I’ll even enclose a picture of myself, and ask, if it’s not too much trouble, could she possibly send goat pics in return?

After 20 minutes of deliberation a jury has found Scout Morrison guilty on 118 misdemeanor charges stemming from a December 2007 harassment incident involving a California ground squirrel.

Morrison, a 2½-year-old German Shepherd mix who was tried as an adult, wagged his tail merrily as the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts, including one count of assault, one count of kidnapping by confinement, one count of torture, one count of reckless mayhem, and 114 counts of criminal barking threats.

Morrison in a 2009 file photo

Morrison was just 11 months old at the time of the incident, during which he chased the squirrel up an elm tree located in his backyard, then barked and paced below for a solid hour, preventing descent by the squirrel, who testified that he was “paralyzed by his fear of heights, and also of being eaten,” and therefore was forced to remain in the upper branches of the elm to a point of mental and physical exhaustion that required immediate hospitalization.

Prosecutor Rocky Lundt, representing the plaintiff through Breaking Down Fences, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to fighting the yardification of squirrel habitats, said he believed the jury reached “absolutely the correct verdict” but also bemoaned the slowness of the criminal justice system. “It may be perfectly fine for humans, or even dogs, to wait a year and a half to see justice served, but California ground squirrels have an average life span of four, maybe five years. It’s an indignity, to say the least, that my client had to spend the best months of his life suffering through baseless motions and hearings while his attacker ran loose in his ancestral home.”

Prosecutor Lundt

The case raised a number of questions pertaining to the nature of ownership and clashing land-use rights between native wildlife and the so-called domesticated predators who arrive with host families following a home sale.

Defense counsel Needles, an opossum who disagreed strongly with the jury’s verdict, noted that while she largely felt sympathy for suburban and exurban wildlife, the backyard in question is attached to a ranch home built in 1954, giving this particular squirrel’s forebears 55 years to relocate to a nice nearby park. Besides which, Needles added, “I maintain, as counsel has repeatedly maintained, that dogs are incapable of recognizing the difference between a scared squirrel and a small, playful dog. One can either choose to see that as vicious or beautifully egalitarian; I think you know where I stand.”

Delays in the case were partly due to discontinuity in Morrison’s defense. Morrison’s initial counsel, Slinky—an undocumented cat who may have been angry with the homeowners for trapping, spaying, and re-releasing her to their yard with a nicked ear—disappeared several months into the trial and wasn’t heard from again. Morrison then briefly enlisted a squirrel attorney, but a caseworker intervened on his behalf to request a competency hearing and Morrison’s trial was put on hold until new counsel could be found.

Needles, who took over Morrison’s case in mid 2008, motioned for a change of venue, arguing that it was “impossible for him to obtain a fair trial in a backyard he feels obliged to defend from alien creatures, strange sounds, and shiny things,” but Judge Chi Chi Champaign, a Chinese Crested dog from next door, ruled that the trial would take place under the pomegranate tree, with jury selection to begin as soon as the homeowners could be bothered to fill the nearby birdfeeders to attract a suitable jury pool.

Judge Champagne

The eventual jury of four house finches, two mourning doves, two lesser goldfinches, two Western scrub-jays, one mockingbird, and one starling all fixed their gaze on Morrison as the jury foreman read the verdicts, convicting Morrison on all counts—despite a potentially damning photograph of the plaintiff that emerged during the trial suggesting he may be in the habit of taunting predators.

Defense exhibit A

“Look, this clearly was not a jury of his peers. Some were just too dumb to get out of jury duty, and the rest obviously had an ax to grind. He’s likely given chase to every one of them at some point,” Needles said. “And 114 counts of criminal barking threats? The squirrel was paralyzed by fear but somehow had his wits about him to count the number of times my client barked. Ever heard of a little thing called ‘playing’ possum? There’s no play to it, folks, that’s threat-triggered paralysis—and I could no more tell you how many times a dog has barked at me in that state than I could tell you what you ate for breakfast in your kitchen this morning, because I wasn’t there!”

Needles went rigid twice during the course of the trial, forcing the court to adjourn indefinitely while she regained consciousness. She spoke frankly about her handicap at the press conference. “It’s certainly a hindrance professionally,” she sighed. “The sudden paralysis is one thing, but the foaming at the mouth and the anal secretions—it’s all quite involuntary, but only other opossums can truly understand the embarrassment. Sure, I think about how life might be different for us otherwise. We have opposable thumbs on our hind feet, you know, and 50 razor-sharp teeth that we rarely get a chance to use defensively because of our stupid maladaptive reflex.”

Needles showing off her teeth to reporters

Prosecutor Lundt moved that Morrison be housed in a secure facility pending sentencing, calling him a “loose cannon,” but Judge Champagne remanded Morrison to the custody of his host family.

“That’s ludicrous!” Lundt shrieked. “The homeowners have been completely irresponsible about curbing this lunatic canine! How can you possibly guarantee my client’s safety?”

Judge Champagne, in a rare show of irritation after the long and sometimes circus-like trial, sighed, blowing the forelock of hair from her brow. “I don’t know, counsel,” she said. “Perhaps your client could, for his own good, temporarily relocate to the perfectly nice elm tree just outside the fence line?”

Sentencing is scheduled for the next time the birdfeeders are filled.

“Would you rather have your birthday presents before we go, or after we come back?” le domestique asked last Friday. She was about to whisk me away for a weekend at the El Morocco Inn, a gay-owned spa resort in Desert Hot Springs, a tiny desert town situated over a bubbling natural mineral oasis about 15 miles outside of Palm Springs.

 

“After,” I said, because I’m all about the delayed gratification.

 

That said, we took off for Riverside County, a part of California we’d given serious thought to boycotting for the foreseeable future in response to its lopsided support for Proposition 8, which its voters passed by a margin of nearly 20 percentage points (compared to Los Angeles County, where it passed by a margin of 1 point). Kiss our money goodbye, assholes! was our immediate reaction to the vote. If we need to pass through your county to get somewhere else, we’ll make sure we head out with plenty of cold drinks and a full tank of gas so that all we spend in your hellhole is toxic emissions.

 

But here’s where le resistance gets complicated. If you look at the county-by-county vote, represented here in the Los Angeles Times’ handy electoral map (use the pull-down menu to access the Prop. 8 stats) in green (where the majority voted yes) and purple (where the majority voted no), you’ll see that we gays don’t have a lot of wiggle room if we want to patronize only gay-affirming counties. While the purple parts are certainly among the loveliest parts of the state, there’s a whole lot of icky to avoid—including every county bordering Los Angeles, with the two most decisively God-loving, homo-hating counties, Kern and Tulare—which each passed the measure by a staggering margin of 50 percentage points—stacked one above the other north of L.A. County, like tiers of bile and spite atop California’s anti–gay wedding cake. (Kern, immediately bordering L.A. County, was particularly notable among California’s 58 counties for being the only one whose clerk defied the court’s marriage equality mandate by poutily ceasing all marriages through her office when she was told she couldn’t selectively deny them to same-sex couples.) When I was younger my father was fond of saying that people in Kern County “would just as soon shoot you as say hello.” His was a cautionary tale, as I was a teenager given to spontaneity, including frequent half-cocked solo driving trips in search of beauty and solace among the High Sierras, which rose majestically—and nonjudgmentally—over the Kern divide. I shrugged off his seemingly hysterical pronouncements about the locals as I drove through their towns to get to California’s most spectacular national parks, preferring to think of rural Californians as quieter types who just craved a little elbow room. Now I’m forced to rethink my position: Maybe they really would just as soon shoot me as say hello.

 

And then there’s our southerly neighboring Riverside County, another hotbed of conservatism. Yet Palm Springs, residing squarely within the county, has more gays and lesbians per capita than San Francisco—estimated at nearly 50% of the permanent population—has elected two consecutive gay mayors, and regularly seats gay city council members. And there are dozens of gay-owned resorts and businesses that damn well deserve our patronage. Boycotting Palm Springs because it’s surrounded by Riverside County would be like picketing the Episcopal Church—which has gone out of its way to welcome, affirm, and even consecrate gays—because its worship services reference the same Bible fundamentalist nut jobs thump in their crusades to condemn us. 

 

Besides, Palm Springs residents have perfected an über-laidback vibe that makes the rest of California seem practically uptight by comparison, and my need to decompress has achieved Trauma Level I in the days following the election. 

 

I’ve been taking the Prop. 8 vote hard—personally even. “It’s not a referendum on you,” le domestique has said more than once, but that hasn’t stopped me from losing sleep at night. The anxiety and dread I had felt for months before the election has evolved into a state of mourning, with the sheer indignity of having my rights put up for majority vote compounded by the cruel echo chamber of loss. Every morning since Election Day, my mind is struck on awakening by thoughts of Prop. 8—before I know whether it’s a workday or a weekend, before I remember anything interesting that might have happened the day prior, before it even occurs to me whether I need to get up and pee—and every morning I have to reprocess feelings of sadness and disbelief and anger all over again.

 

The few days immediately following the election were the worst, when I felt simultaneously numb and raw.  I don’t know if it’s possible to fully express to anyone who hasn’t experienced it directly what it’s like to finally feel like a first-class citizen in her own state after a lifetime of being held separate, only to lose that status five months later by a simple majority vote of her fellow citizens, citizens who were allowed to vote on the scope of my rights in a way that theirs have never been negotiable, citizens who considered the scope of gay rights on the same ballot and in the same manner that they considered the scope of the rights of farm animals, citizens who chose, in the end, to expand the rights of farm animals—passing an initiative to mandate larger cage sizes for egg-laying hens and other livestock by a statewide margin of more than 26 percentage points—even as they opted to diminish the rights of gays by a statewide margin of 4 points.

 

 

What saved my sanity most those first few post-election days was seeing the outpouring of emotion among my community—all that sadness and anger and passion and exhilaration that spontaneously hit the streets and came marching right past my office building the day after the vote, shutting down Wilshire Boulevard for hours; if the folks below look a little exhausted, it’s because this protest started at 2 o’clock that afternoon in front of the Los Angeles Mormon Temple, then morphed into a peaceful march around the city that lasted well past sunset.

 

 

Two and a half weeks later, I’m still waking to thoughts of Prop. 8 every goddamn morning, but while many of the same feelings of hurt and anger and loss are stirred, the emotions already feel partially processed, and it’s such a relief not to have to start from scratch each day.

 

My therapist and I have agreed that I’m going through a fairly typical mourning process, as though I’ve suffered a death of someone dear, and though I’m able to seek respite from my grief in sleep, or in brief moments of distraction, my consciousness is otherwise haunted by the constancy of this loss that seems to consume all the oxygen in the room. The good news, we’ve agreed, is that the mourning process eventually resolves and life returns to normal, and I see that happening for me—in fits and starts and by small degrees, with steps backward in between.

 

The evening before my birthday I sat in a perfectly heated Jacuzzi under billowing sheer canopies and a starlit desert night at our magical, intimate inn—and despite the beauty and comfort and peace I found myself surrounded by, my core was again weighted down by the constant sadness of these past two weeks.

 

“We got married!” le domestique said, trying to cheer me. “No one can take that away from us.”

 

“We haven’t even received our license in the mail yet; it could get annulled before we have it in hand,” I countered glumly.

 

“We got married, and nothing changes that,” she said firmly.

 

“Even if our marriage stands, so long as Prop. 8 is valid, don’t you think ours will always be a marriage with an asterisk?” I asked. “Like we’ll always have to explain it somehow: ‘Yeah, we got married during that five-month window in 2008.’ Don’t you think people will think of these as fake marriages, like the San Francisco couples in 2004?”

 

“No, we got married legally, and there isn’t anyone alive right now who won’t remember this time,” le domestique said.

 

The next day we went to Palm Springs City Hall to participate in the nationwide coordinated city hall demonstrations. (Sure, I went to a protest on my birthday, but after the demonstration we would return to the spa resort for scheduled massages—perhaps marking us as softies among the civilly disobedient.)

 

The mayor spoke, along with a number of city council members, ministers, organizers, and activists, including Harvey Milk campaign worker and AIDS Memorial Quilt founder Cleve Jones, whom I had the pleasure of meeting and thanking for his inspiration. Ahead of the curve as usual, Jones proposes that we focus our energies on the federal government, not individual states, to overturn all 30 of the existing constitutional marriage bans legislatively, and that we don’t stop there but insist that the incoming administration of Pres. Barack Obama together with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid act with appropriate speed to address LGBT inequities in military service, adoption, immigration, employment discrimination laws, hate-crime protections,  and access to social services. Visit Seven Weeks to Equality and read what he has to say—and sign the petition. I promise it’s worth the click.

 

 

Attending the demonstration lifted my spirits. (It was our second, after one the week prior in Anaheim, in another conservative hotbed, Orange County, my old stomping grounds. Though my battle cry was “Let’s storm Sleeping Beauty’s castle!” sadly, we got nowhere near Disneyland.) Later that night, instead of speaking only of innocuous things at the inn’s circular bar amid all the straight couples at happy hour, we chatted gamely with the innkeepers about the demonstration, Prop. 8, and the fate of our marriages. A couple who was celebrating their one-year wedding anniversary—and who the night before had asked a fellow straight couple of eight years for tips on staying together—overheard us talking to the innkeepers and remarked, “Wow, 14 years! Do you two have any tips for us?” It was a good moment.

 

The next morning we were sad to leave our little gay desert hideaway in the middle of “red” California, but we had jobs to get back to—not to mention those birthday presents.

 

On arriving home, le domestique retrieved the mail and sang out, “Hey, look what we got!” And there it was, an envelope from the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s office of birth, death, and marriage records. Having neither celebrated a birth nor suffered a death—despite my grieving—this seemed indicative of a rare and precious thing. The envelope was unexpectedly hand-addressed, like a highly personal gesture of goodwill directly from the registrar-recorder. And inside was our certificate of marriage—with no obvious asterisk denoting the state of limbo in which we’ve felt so cruelly suspended—engraved with the Great Seal of the State of California.

 

 

I needed that reminder that, essentially, the state still had our back, because I’ve lately come to realize that in part what I’m mourning is the loss of California. I grew up here. This is my state, one that I’ve always felt proud to live in—perhaps insufferably so in the eyes of some of my friends. And while I was stressed and anxious about Prop. 8 having made it to the ballot, and while I fully realized that I should brace for the worst, in my heart I thought, Not here. Not in my fucking state.

 

Ours was the first state to pass a marriage-equality bill legislatively, in 2005, and the legislature passed yet another bill in 2007, after the first one was vetoed by our movie star governor, who reasoned, against the din of Republican angst over “activist judges,” that our rights were a matter best left to the courts. When our rights did come before the state supreme court, the justices made marriage equality the law of the land, which boded well for gays in the rest of the country—but also made our state’s constitution a national battleground—since it was the California supreme court that trailblazed the eventual overthrow of anti-miscegenation laws nationwide with its Perez v. Sharp decision in 1948, a full 19 years before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1967 Loving v. Virginia case, which found that the right to marry is a basic civil right and that the infringement of that right violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sixty years later, the California court referred to the Perez case in its same-sex marriage ruling repeatedly and compellingly, only to see its ruling overturned five months later by “the will of the people.” 

 

 

On November 19, California’s supreme court justices announced that they had decided 6–1 to hear an appeal on the constitutionality of Proposition 8. We’re not disputing the result of the vote or trying to subvert the democratic process, as our opponents would have their unthinking followers believe; we’re contesting the validity of the proposition itself, asserting that it never should have made it to the ballot in the first place without prior approval of the legislature—a case we tried to get heard prior to the election. It is frightfully easy to mount a citizen-driven ballot initiative in California: It took just 1.1 million petition signatures to get it on the ballot—in a state with over 25 million registered voters—and it required a simple majority of 50% + 1 to pass. Good enough when one is deciding whether to increase the size of cages for egg-laying hens. Not so humane when asking an electorate to weigh in on the rights of a historically unpopular minority. Had the citizen-driven initiative process existed at the time of the Perez ruling, I’m quite certain that an anti–interracial marriage amendment would have been placed on the very next ballot and that it would have passed resoundingly, because in 1948, “the people” weren’t any more ready for a Mexican-American woman to marry an African-American man than they are ready in 2008 for me to marry the woman I love. 

 

Every U.S. citizen should be concerned about what the church lobby has been able to accomplish with voter-driven initiatives. Gays may bear the brunt of attacks from those who wish to legislate morality, but propositions aimed at curbing gay rights in Florida and Arkansas this election cycle also affected straights. Domestic-partnership benefits for couples of all sexual orientations were wiped out in Florida, forcing many senior citizens to choose between continuance of the pension and Social Security benefits they earned during their first marriage and basic relationship recognition, including hospital-visitation rights, with the partner they’ve found a new life with. And all unmarried couples, gay and straight, were barred from adopting or fostering children in Arkansas, which is pretty tough luck for the approximately 1,000 children currently languishing in orphanages and group homes in the state. Do you suppose the folks who voted to keep all those kids safe from sinfully cohabitating couples will now step up and take on an extra charge or two to make up the difference? 

 

 

It’s funny, in the days immediately following the election, I was worried about legal challenges by our side. I felt that the Yes on 8 crowd had gotten exactly what they wanted: a mandate from “the people” proving that they still weren’t ready to accept us as fully equal citizens; they could now point to Prop. 8, just as they’ve long pointed to Prop. 22, to say that “the people” want to enshrine heterosexual hegemony in California law. We could bring lawsuits, I thought, but we’ve already lost in the court of popular opinion, so could we ever really win our rights back in the near term?

 

My thinking has evolved since then, as I’ve reminded myself, as I’ve so often reminded those who tirelessly beat the “activist judges” drum, that it is among the court’s most sacred duties to protect persecuted minorities from the tyranny of the majority. I also reminded myself that 5,796,637 Californians—nearly 48% of the electorate—did vote against Prop. 8. Exit polls calculate that self-identifying lesbian, gay, and bisexual voters make up just 6% of the California electorate; that accounts for 727,162 of the no votes, assuming that all LGB voters affirmed their own right to marry. That leaves 5,069,475 self-identified heterosexual voters who joined our tiny minority and voted to protect our rights. Compare that to 2000, when only 2,909,370 voters—38.4%—said no to Prop. 22′s call for heterosexual dominion. Subtracting the 6% of the total number of Californians who voted on Prop. 22 whom we can assume were LGB—451,682—all from the con side, leaves us with 2,457,688 straight allies in 2000. It’s nice enough to think that we’ve moved the needle in our favor by nearly 20 percentage points, from a 23-point loss on Prop. 22 to a 4-point heartbreaker on Prop. 8, in eight years, but it’s astounding to confront the sheer number that represents: In 2000, 2.5 million straight Californians stood up for our equality; in 2008, 5 million did.     

 

And I have a message to those 52.2% of California voters who, when it came time to cast their vote, were too blinded by lies or homophobia or plain narrow-minded disgust to envision equality for their gay neighbor or coworker or cousin—because if you think you don’t know anyone gay at this point in your life, you’re just being willfully ignorant: You’ve stopped the marriages, for now. You’ve put us on notice that, the way you see it, our relationships aren’t like yours. But you’re on the wrong side of history, and one day not very long from now you’ll either lie about how you voted November 4, or you’ll scramble to justify your positions, digging yourself deeper and deeper into your unknowing, incurious, paranoid world as you trot out all the discredited arguments about the myriad ways you felt threatened by our simple plea to be treated with dignity and respect.

 

Or maybe you’ll just blame your vote on your preacher, because it’ll be easier to admit to blind allegiance than bald bigotry.

 

In the meantime, le domestique my wife and I are one of the 18,000 couples who got married between June 17 and November 4, and you may threaten my tenuous grip on first-class citizenship and seek to demean me in myriad ways. But the wind is at my back, and from what I’ve seen in these past couple of weeks, Prop. 8’s passage has done more to galvanize the forward momentum of gay rights than any event in my lifetime.

 

 

 

We’ll get same-sex marriage back in California, all right, but we might just get it back as a result of federal legislation overturning all 30 of these embarrassing, un-American, criminally offensive constitutional amendments. 

 

The final lines of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America seem particularly apt here: 

 

“The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come. Bye now. You are fabulous creatures, each and every one.”

 

Sign hand-painted by the talented Treecup, who also officiated our wedding, because she’s full-service like that.

I’ll bet you thought we’d forget, caught up as we are in our own California drama. It’s true that we do tend to get a little insular way out west, but you can’t blame us, really, given the constant predictions—and fervent wishes—that “the big one” will finally hit and we’ll just break off and float out to sea, an island at last. (For the record, geologists say that the way the tectonic plates are arranged, an earthquake with the power to move our land mass would more likely shift us farther north than detach us from these United States, so the rest of the country is kind of stuck with us—and us with it.)

 

Even on this, your first day of legal same-sex marriages, you seem to be in an excellent position to maintain your equality, since Connecticut is free of the often-whimsical constitutional initiative process that allows tyrannous majorities to reverse court protections for less-than-popular minorities. And since the free-thinking citizens of your state have just voted down their once-every-20-year opportunity to mount a costly constitutional convention—so prayerfully endorsed by the God-loving, homo-hating Family Institute of Connecticut—you’ll have plenty of time now to show the good people in your state that, just like those of your Massachusetts neighbors, your marriages will do nothing to threaten theirs. The failure of your constitutional convention’s passage being our nation’s sole ballot question that could be considered a gay-rights victory this election cycle—however indirect, and however much we can thank the role of fiscal concerns, over nebulous ideals of equality, for their influence over practical Nutmeggers—we owe a debt of gratitude to Connecticut voters for that tiny ray of light that pierced the California-Arizona-Florida-Arkansas sweep of homophobic darkness.

 

 

And I just checked an online poll in the Hartford Courant that has y’all ahead in the public-approval sweepstakes, with 68% of respondents saying they support the right of same-sex couples to marry (with 22% saying that they do not, thanksverymuch, and 10% saying that they support civil unions only). True, this is based on only about 9,000 responses so far, and truer, this is a question that shouldn’t even have to be asked in 2008—as natural as homosexuality feels to many readers of this blog, this would be, for us, akin to a newspaper querying readers on whether blue-eyed people should be allowed to marry brown-eyed people—but still, it’s a promising start to a hopeful time in your state.

 

Alas, we’ve been too busy protesting Prop. 8’s passage to shop for a gift, but what I would personally wish for you is this: I hope that the joy you take in your weddings is as breathtaking and liberating as the joy I took in mine. I hope you get that newlywed feeling—even those of you who have been together for decades. I hope you feel, as I did, like first-class citizens at last, at least in your own state, and that you walk a little taller with your husbands and wives as a result.

 

I know that you won’t take your marriages for granted. I have yet to meet a same-sex couple who has treated their right to marry with anything less than stunned reverence. We have wished and hoped and fought for this for far too long to see it as anything less than what it is: equal recognition, at last, of our right to love.

 

Mazel tov!

The following is a letter I wrote to my family, sent today, six days before a ballot initiative comes before California voters that has been described by the pro–marriage equality camp as “Gettysburg,” and by the anti–marriage equality folks as “Armageddon.” And the Hyperbole Award goes to…  

 

Dear Friends—

 

Well, e-mail may seem like a clumsy way to announce this, but Elizabeth and I got married. We had to act quickly to make sure we were legal ahead of the November 4 election—just in case Proposition 8 passes and closes the door on same-sex marriage—and we did so quietly because, after being together for 14 years, we already felt married.

 

But now I have to admit, actually being legally married does feel different.

 

In the absence of legal recognition, Elizabeth and I defined our relationship for years on our own terms. Then when California introduced a domestic-partnership registry in 1999, we went downtown and signed up for the handful of benefits it offered at the time. Over the years California legislators fought to expand our rights under that registry such that, by 2007, domestic partnership was practically identical to marriage—except in name. And that difference in name was a constant reminder that in the eyes of the state, our relationship fell under a category of recognition that held us separate from our relatives and so many of our friends.

 

Now that artificial separation is erased, and this joy I feel being married represents something far more profound than a shift in nomenclature: It’s the realization of true equality, and it’s been a long time coming!

 

I hope that you don’t mind my using the occasion of my marriage announcement to politick just a little bit, because these feelings could be very short-lived if Proposition 8 wins. Honestly, there’s never been an initiative on the California ballot more threatening to my ongoing rights and happiness. As a family member, you’ve always treated me as a first-class citizen, and I have every reason to think that you’re in favor of the state treating me likewise. Still, given that so many voters have reservations about same-sex marriage based on what the initiative’s supporters have been saying, I can’t let this election pass without addressing the topic directly with those who care most about me.

 

A few truths:

 

First, neither the California Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage nor Prop. 8 will have any effect on what is taught in schools. The state superintendent of public schools has himself appeared in television spots to assure voters that curriculum will not be affected in any way, and the California Teachers Association explains in a press release: “Proposition 8 will not affect teaching in our schools. That’s a lie crafted to scare people into voting for Proposition 8 and stripping Californians of rights they already have. Not one word in Prop. 8 mentions education, and no child can be forced, against the will of their parents, to be taught anything about health and family issues at school. California law prohibits it.”

 

Second, the marriage ruling has nothing to do with adoption laws. In California, same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children, and Prop. 8’s passage would have no effect on the state adoption code. The defeat of Prop. 8, however, would have a profound positive effect on the children of same-sex parents. Granting gay and lesbian couples the privileges and benefits of civil marriage, far from posing harm to families, affords the children of same-sex couples the same advantages and stable family structures that children of opposite-sex couples already enjoy. Approximately 60,000 children are currently being raised by same-sex parents in the state of California; it’s frankly impossible to reconcile sincere concern for the welfare of children and families with a concurrent rejection of this population’s needs for equivalent benefits and security.

 

Third, the Supreme Court ruling was not the work of “four activist judges.” Three of the four judges who voted to affirm same-sex marriage were appointed by Republican governors, and they weren’t creating “special rights” for gays and lesbians—they were recognizing the equal rights and protections already present in the California state constitution for all citizens. Prop. 8’s supporters say that such things should be decided by the people, not the courts, and in a perfect world, I would agree. Unfortunately, gays and lesbians are a tiny minority—about 6%, by latest estimates—and a historically unpopular one at that. The most sacred trust of the court is to protect the interests of minorities from an unsympathetic or unknowing majority, and this court took that tenet to heart. Sadly, Prop. 8 needs only a simple majority of 50% + 1 to reverse the court’s ruling and its protections for my community.

 

Fourth, marriage equality poses no threat to religious freedom in California. No church or minister of any sort can be compelled to marry anyone, gay or straight.

 

Lastly, a domestic partnership is not the same thing as a marriage. If it were, it wouldn’t need a different name.

 

If Prop. 8 passes, legal consensus says that my marriage to Elizabeth will likely stand, along with the 11,000 other same-sex marriages that have taken place since June 17 in what has been an incredible summer of love for same-sex couples, but our feeling of first-class citizenship would be diminished. Relegating gays and lesbians to a second class is what this constitutional amendment seeks to do, singling out a minority population and stripping them of civil rights that all other citizens enjoy.

 

Before 1998, when Alaska passed the nation’s first state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage by majority ballot vote, no constitution in the United States had ever been amended to rescind rights from a law-abiding segment of the population. It should have been impossible to do such a thing in America, but since then, 25 other states have passed similar constitutional amendments—largely through campaigns employing scare tactics that targeted gays and lesbians as a threat to American families and values—and this year, amendments are on ballots in Florida, Arizona, and California. I hope you’ll join me on Election Day in telling the rest of the nation that those kinds of scare tactics just won’t work here, and that that kind of discrimination is impossible in California.

 

Thank you for your love and support.

 

And please, if you feel that I deserve the same rights that you do, forward this e-mail to your friends—or, blog visitors, send a link! I feel strongly that people of all political and religious persuasions believe foremost in honesty, and however emotionally close to this issue I am, I think all will find that I’ve presented the facts plainly and truthfully.  

 

In a joint press conference held Thursday morning in Washington, D.C., leaders of the Brigadoon Republicans, a gay conservative political action group, and the International Brotherhood of Unicorns announced that they are joining forces in the interest of greater visibility and increased political leverage.

“This is a great moment for both of our causes,” announced a man in a coat and tie who preferred that his name be kept off the record because he’s not out to his family. “We have so much in common with unicorns everywhere, constantly having our veracity questioned, our sincerity doubted, our lives ridiculed. And we love their logo!”

“We’re really looking forward to this new partnership,” affirmed IBU executive director Bedazzle at the press conference. “But not in a gay way. We’re not gay.”

Buttercup, president of the unicorn-agnosticism organization Stop Horning Around, which staged a protest near the press conference, charges that IBU isn’t a political action organization at all but rather a “group of single-minded extremists working to enforce their own belief system in the name of naked self-interest.”

“That’s so offensive to us,” said Bedazzle. “We stand for so much more than proselytizing people to believe as we do. We happen to advocate for small government and lower taxes. Also, can security please get this child off of me!”

Brigadoon Republicans members wore unicorn masks to show solidarity with IBU members, whose platform they say they fully embrace. “We’re really on point with IBU and are looking forward to joining them in their lobbying efforts,” said a spokesman. “We’re hoping to bring a male, Christian, post-adolescent voice to the age-old struggle for unicorn recognition.”

Asked whether he thought lesbian members of his organization might help bridge the gender gap in unicorn acceptance, the Brigadoon Republicans spokesman replied, “We don’t believe in lesbians.”

As I write this, I’m not in Hawaii or even in a Starbucks but in our home office, a room that shouts every bit of our house’s 1954 vintage with its dark-paneled walls and diamond-paned windows; we’ve paid homage to its build era with the odd Esther Williams movie lobby card and a framed oversized pullout RCA Victor magazine ad announcing the company’s latest line of 17 television sets, several of which are lovingly caressed by ladies in ball gowns. The view through those diamond-paned windows diverges sharply from 1954, when it was reportedly among the first few houses in our neighborhood, an area of the San Fernando Valley then dominated by apricot orchards. It now overlooks a well-traveled thoroughfare bisecting our thoroughly residential neighborhood, and on weekends I can often expect to watch a recent immigrant, perhaps undocumented, fixing his truck. I’m not crazy about car repairs taking place in my front yard, but I know whose side I’m on amid all the current anti-immigrant Republican hysteria, if only to differentiate myself from these folks:

Honk for spelling proficiency!

Let’s play an analogy game!

Recent immigrants are to many U.S. citizens…

as Eleutherodactylus coqui tree frogs are to many _____________.

If you answered “Hawaiians,” put a gold star on your forehead and proceed directly to the lightning round! And if you want to incur the wrath of same, stage a demonstration for “nonnative” species’ rights anywhere islanders gather.

Our first night on the Big Island we kept looking up into the trees trying to identify the bird emitting this relatively high-pitched but sweet co-qui call. The sound was everywhere, but there were curiously few birds in sight. When we tabled the issue the following morning at breakfast, our B&B hosts told us that the owners of the call were not birds at all but rather tree frogs:

The nonnative species has become a scourge across the island due to that tireless co-qui, used by boy frogs much as a male human would use Barry White records: to both repel other males and attract females. And like Barry, who “Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe,” the little boy frogs court and impregnate the hyper-fertile ladies all the livelong year. (The males average a tiny 34 millimeters, while females reach an average of 41 millimeters, with the pronounced size difference attributed to the burden of all that reproductive energy expended by males.) So successful are the boy frogs at creating more frogs that their species, introduced accidentally to several Hawaiian islands in the mid 1990s via plant matter, has reached densities in some rain forests of approximately 8,000 specimens per acre. That’s about the same density the little devils have achieved in their native Puerto Rico, the difference being that in Puerto Rico they’re reportedly revered as a beloved native species and a symbol of territorial culture, much as Mexicans, all the rage reportedly in Mexico, are seen as encroachers in Los Angeles, especially when they’re not cleaning your toilets.

Mind you, some of the folks who disparagingly pronounced the coqui a nuisance nonnative species themselves arrived in Hawaii later than the frogs did—much as most “native” Angelenos’ families lazily trickled into California quite some time after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when the United States “bought” the Southwest from Mexico for $15 million and a psych! fingers-crossed promise to honor Mexican citizens’ preexisting property rights in the territories. Truly, the guy fixing his car in my yard may have a greater claim on my yard than I do—unless I play my Native American card.

If we could all just agree that the concepts of nativeness and citizenship are wack, we’d probably get along a lot better. But U.S. citizens are an I-me-mine lot, even if their families first immigrated to the United States in the 20th century, glossing entirely the part where their own tired, poor, huddled masses were disparaged as wretched refuse by preexisting 19th-century immigrants, who were in turn looked down on by 18th-century immigrants, who seemed like upstarts to Mayflower importees, of whom my own longest-standing North American forebears, the Peigan Blackfeet tribe, were understandably leery.

My Native American bloodline has since been diluted considerably by breeding with Swedes and Germans, but it’s that eighth-part Blackfoot blood that most captures my imagination, both because of the Ninawaki (“manly hearted woman”) tradition—aberrational tribal members identified by early European settlers as women who, contrary to the submissive Blackfeet feminine “ideal,” dressed and acted like their male counterparts, held tribal ranks, owned horses, told bawdy jokes, and sometimes engaged in warrior roles—and because, I suppose, if anti-immigrant assholes want to distinguish native versus nonnative species on a scale of centuries, I’ll gamely play that Native American card and ask them how many millennia their people have been here and suggest that maybe they should vacate my continent. Also, if the Blackfeet Nation ever exercises its sovereign right to establish large-scale gambling on its Montana reservation, I want a piece of my casino.

The Hawaiian Islands having been formed by volcanic activity, there aren’t really any native Hawaiian species, but by casual observation, the imposed cutoff for native versus nonnative species seems to be around 1950. If you landed or were brought to one or more of the islands before then, congratulations, you’re a Hawaiian species. If not, you’re a nuisance, especially if you make a lot of reproductive noise or mess with the ecosystem of a preexisting species. Take the nene—about which le domestique can tell you much more—a Hawaiian goose that serves as the official state bird (it is found in the wild exclusively on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island). The nene (pronounced nay-nay) is a threatened species whose numbers declined to near extinction around 1952 thanks to hunters and other mean predators and maybe not the best survival instincts on the nenes’ own part. Through human interventions like captive breeding programs they have bounced back from a paltry 30 birds to between 500 and 3,000 today, but there’s a new recent immigrant in town to fuck with the nenes: the Kalij pheasant, a Himalayan breed disparagingly referred to as “those damn chickens” by many residents.

The Kalij pheasant arrived in 1962, a dozen years too late to be considered native, and thrived like a mofo such that by 1977 it was declared a legal game bird. In other words, “We’re lousy with these guys, so let’s shoot ’em”—an attitude not unlike that of self-appointed border vigilantes, who seemingly never got over their crushing disappointment at being rejected from any real job that would allow them to discharge a firearm in the line of duty. Thanks be to heaven that God recognized the need for the Second Amendment when he wrote our glorious Constitution; otherwise we might question the deep and patriotic need for random people to stockpile weapons at a ratio of 200 million firearms to 300 million Americans, and if we didn’t have all those guns, how would we ever feel secure?

One reason the Kalij pheasant is so successful on Hawaii is that it breeds quite competently in the wild [see also: coqui tree frogs]. Adding to its advantages, the Kalij is an omnivore [see also: humans], so while the nene is all finicky with its diet of leaves and berries, the Kalij krew is sucking down entire plants, from roots to buds, robbing the nenes of current and future crops in a single sitting.

I feel for the poor nenes (to say nothing of honest-to-god, born-here white guys), but should coqui tree frogs, those damn chickens, or even brown people really be faulted for thriving in a new environment? Adaptation is a handy skill that’s otherwise lauded by humans. As an invasive species to Hawaii myself, one of my first acts on arrival was to purchase a basic Hawaiian grammar book, both because I’m a big freakball and because I didn’t want to mangle the names of streets and people and seem too much like a tourist, though I’m guessing that any cred I attained in my prodigious ability to pronounce Queen Lili’uokalani’s name was blown as a result of my visit to the Mauna Loa macadamia nut factory:

Learning about the 12-letter alphabet, including all five vowels plus seven consonants, explained the paucity of hard sounds among all those mellifluous mingling vowels, and picking up some basic rules—like every syllable and every word must end in a vowel sound, no two consonants can occur without a vowel separating them, and the accent almost always falls on the penultimate syllable—helped me adapt to my new environment. Not that Hawaii has much of an adapt-or-die vibe, but failure to adapt can be so ugly. Consider the Bradys.

I wish I could tell you that I didn’t think even once about the three-episode Hawaiian vacation arc of The Brady Bunch while visiting the islands, but that would be a lie. I was reminded of it on our very first day, as we hiked the very first trail at Volcanoes National Park. The Bradys didn’t even go to the Big Island as far as I’m aware, but they trotted gamely alongside as we walked past the steam vents of Kilauea, as I undoubtedly drove le domestique to murderous thoughts by painstakingly describing every bit of trouble various family members encountered as a result of Bobby’s having picked up that infernal tiki idol.

That isn’t to say that my Brady memories weren’t corrupted. For instance, I remembered that Don Ho had made a guest appearance, but I misremembered that it had in fact been he who told Bobby the idol would bring an invasive species like himself nothing but heartache; now that I’ve refreshed my memory at the information gettin’ place called the Internet, I’m reminded that he was warned off the idol by those same random guys who told Greg about the big surfing contest that he should enter—because Greg had clearly and obviously become a championship surfer on the flight over.

Le domestique had to be reminded of these basic plot elements because she [claims she] has maybe never even seen the Bradys’ Hawaii triptych! She is, however, aware that the Bradys had run into similarly stressful situations on their Grand Canyon trip, which led us to speculate on a hike through a stunningly beautiful rain forest that the Bradys simply should not have traveled, because they never encountered such strife when they stuck to their own turf, which happens to be the very San Fernando Valley that we call home, which volleys up another issue: As SFV dwellers accustomed to our soft city life on a piece of land which, however licked lengthwise by the Pacific, is contiguously linked to a whole continent’s worth of infrastructure, are we not just as ill-equipped to meet Pele on her own terms? Le domestique picked up a tiki idol in the Honolulu airport; had she slipped it into her theoretical purse instead of setting it back down—after noting that it was made in China—would we have ended up like the Brady boys, hapless hostages of a late-career Vincent Price in his creepy cave lair?

Which brings us to the Thurston Lava Tube, the product of an approximately 500-year-old lava flow that could easily have served as the set for Price’s cool tiki cave hideout. It seems that as a lava flow cools, the outside can form a solid upper crust even as lava continues to flow through its insulated center, forming a tunnel. It’s kind of like a Twinkie, another potentially 500-year-old product, with its creamy goodness excised. Unlike the Thurston Lava Tube, no Twinkie has yet been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site—but fear not, the little sponge cake can’t be denied its due forever.

VNP has been kind enough to illuminate a section of the TLT that is fairly uniform in width and height such that the average invasive species can amble through it without a flashlight and get the subterranean vibe without need of much courage. But there is kindness also in letting nature stand for itself, and because Hawaii is cool like that, VNP has left a much longer section of the tunnel—a portion less regular in width, height, and depth—dark and craggy and separated from tourists only by a gate and sign warning of its undeveloped nature and the absolute necessity of self-provided light sources beyond that point. Again, I have to hand it to the country of Hawaii for warning tourists of potential pitfalls and then leaving it to us to decide whether we’d like to face the very slight odds that the awesomeness that lies just around the bend could claim a life, perhaps my own.

Happily, le domestique had packed a headlamp, so we surfaced to the rainforest exterior and made our way back to our rental car, then returned to descend its murky maw. As she who is inordinately fond of dark, drippy, and slightly dangerous places, I pronounced the undeveloped part of the TLT an early trip nominee for Coolest Place Ever!

Sharing a single headlamp posed its challenges, but we held hands. Tightly. Tighter still when I noted the similarity in sights and sounds to the very creepy horror flick The Descent, wherein a swell group of nonnative species of the gal variety go spelunking only to encounter subterranean cannibalistic humanoids way scarier than any late-career Vincent Price could ever be. They sound like giggling cockroaches and look like this:

Let’s play an analogy game!

The humanoids in The Descent are to the Sleestaks of Land of the Lost…

as the Thurston Lava Tube is to a ___________.

The dark side of TLT is the kind of place that makes a person feel brave and scared witless all at once—and maybe a little happier for the experience once it’s over, at which time I wanted to do it again. Not unlike riding a roller coaster backward, a terrifying proposition Magic Mountain (now Six Flags) used to occasionally offer up back in the day on its monster wooden coaster Colossus. I was never the bravest kid on the block, but the first rule of hanging out with boys is, Do as they do, and don’t cry about it. So I rode the damn roller coaster backward, never happier than when it finally pulled back into the station. Coming home from Hawaii hasn’t yielded that same sense of bewildered relief, but I know that if I overstayed my welcome there, the stigma of my invasive species status would eventually get me down. I had to return to my “native” soil, because unlike the coqui tree frog, I’m neither willing nor able to replicate myself 10,000-fold to claim my piece of the rain forest, especially when just a one-eighth share is enough to claim sovereign casino gambling rights. I’m waiting, my Blackfeet people.

Speaking of roller coasters, I apologize for any jarring segues, tangents, or abandoned roads you may have noted in the preceding text. My brain is currently laboring under the auspices of Her Royal Highness Mania, which bestows on my thought processes all the fluid melody of free jazz—and makes me think everything I’ve written is fucking brilliant! She’s a fun friend, until she’s not, at which time I may sheepishly delete this post and salt the cyberspace it once occupied.

As I write this, le domestique and I are Hawaii-bound for a twin 40^th-birthday celebration, mine having passed with much blog fanfare in November and hers yet forthcoming in March. She observed just moments ago that this is our first ever flight from Los Angeles without the psych! westbound takeoff–U-turn combo. Departing LAX, planes always take off over the Pacific, after which eastbound flights turn around and head on their merry overland way. This time we brashly continued our westward trajectory, prompting me to observe that this is also our first flight entirely over water and therefore entirely without emergency landing opportunities, which was kind of a weird place for me to go, because I’ve never worried about flying. I blame it on Lost, which films in the country of Hawaii. (Le domestique is trying to fool me into believing that Hawaii is actually part of the United States; she’s funny like that.)

 

While waiting at the airport for a red eye—the espresso/coffee beverage, not the icky itinerary—I saw a flight attendant lose her grip on her cappuccino only to catch it between her stomach and the wall of the coffee counter without spilling a drop. “Nice save!” I said, to which she merrily replied “Thanks!”

 

“That seems like a good omen for your flight today,” I added—unwisely, it turned out. She looked at me like I had just licked the foam from her drink, and it was only then that I realized that’s kind of an asshole thing to say to a flight attendant, reminding her that on the slim chance that her flight goes very, very badly, she could soon die screaming. And while unforeseen dangers lurk in every life and career, no one has ever suggested as I’ve left for work that my day might yield life-threatening complications—beyond perhaps a confluence of articles so incompetently written that I pulpify my brain with repeated blows to the skull from my desk dictionary, which, while only slightly less likely than a plane crash, is more self-determinable.

 

The idea of horrible things that can happen on planes seeped into my brain when we arrived at the airport, simply because LAX was the least busy I’ve seen it since pre-9/11 days. We walked right up to the self-serve kiosk and checked ourselves in, then le domestique noticed that the plane was only about half-full, so we delightedly switched our seats to an empty middle row of three, leaving a vacancy between us so that we can stretch out a bit and, as the need arises, flail our arms about wildly without striking one another. Our luck continued as we delivered our checked baggage directly to a waiting TSA guy and waltzed through security. For several years after 9/11 I was pulled aside at airport security for an in-depth search of my bags and person EVERY TIME I FLEW, lending little credence to officers’ claims that I had been randomly selected. Perhaps I share my name with a person of interest to the United States government—like maybe that bog turtle expert is a fugitive shoe bomber—or it could just be that TSA training highlights the probability of gender-vague troublemakers. Whatever the reason, I’m very glad to have escaped the long arm of the TSA law, because I really dislike having stern people paw around in my undiepants and such.

 

As a copy editor by trade, I would ordinarily spell out the full name of any organization or government bureau on first reference, with subsequent references given in acronym form, but I’ve forgotten for the moment what TSA stands for, and at 30,000 feet I’m temporarily denied help from the Internet. I’ve heard that some foreign air carriers already provide free in-flight Wi-Fi as a tonic to bored travelers, and while I wish my own country’s airlines would embrace the concept, I understand that those same foreign carriers are allowing in-flight mobile phone use as well, and if it’s a package deal, I’m against it. I guard my sanity too jealously to be forced to listen to Mr. No Inside Voice narrate his journey to his Bluetooth or, worse, drone endlessly to a business associate about how their Cincinnati office is totally on board with the idea to move forward on the plan to introduce their strategic objectives at the next planning meeting of the oversight committee for Strategic Idea Summit 2008: How to Introduce Your Plans for Maximum Forward Movement With Minimum Oversight.

 

I became absolutely convinced that we had passed through a time-warp portal and entered the Golden Age of Air Travel when a flight attendant handed me a hot breakfast of eggs scrambled with sour cream and chives, potatoes, ham, fruit, and a muffin. Other than your complimentary beverages, not a single four-hour flight I’ve taken in the last decade has resulted in anything but some weird processed “havarti” cheese ’n’ crackers, a cookie, and, when lucky, a smile, so I can only surmise that this five-hour-and-nine-minute estimated flight time is critical to the awarding of victuals.

 

Le domestique just observed that no amount of mahalos on a form obfuscates the fact that the country of Hawaii makes its visitors fill out a survey disclosing just what it is exactly that we’re up to in their environs and also whether we’ve brought along any live seafood or virus cultures. And our 50-something mainlander flight attendant did not engage in the spirit of aloha when I asked her whether, as domestic partners, we could submit a single “family” declaration form. “Excuse me?” she said.

 

“We’re domestic partners,” I repeated, indicating le domestique. “Can we fill out a single form?”

 

“If you’re a family, you only have to fill out one form,” she said, halfway gone before she finished speaking. Her tone excluded the sunny interpretation that she was surprised I would even have to ask such a question since, as we all know, love makes a family.

 

At any rate, I let le domestique’s form speak for the both of us. But if I had filled out my own form, I would have categorically denied any intended mischief pertaining to crustacean or virus smuggling, and I would have disclosed to Hawaiian officials that I have come to their country for the lava…

 

 …and the coffee!

 

“Wouldn’t it be neat if you could go coffee-tasting like you can go wine-tasting!” I enthused to le domestique a week or so ago, after I realized that the Big Island, on which we’ll be spending the lion’s share of our trip, is where the Kona coffee lives! Hey, wouldn’t it be even neater if there were a way you could find out whether such a thing is possible in just 0.31 seconds, which is how long, sans typing, a Google search for “kona coffee tasting” took to return 1,740 results! Six hundred coffee farms have convened along one 25-mile stretch of scenic country roads for my tasting convenience. Whee!

 

We had actually booked on the Big Island for that other alluring hot liquid. Living as we do in Southern California, we’ve got all the white sandy beaches anyone could ever want or need, but there’s simply nowhere we can go when we want to watch liquid fire devour everything in its path. To me, lava seemed worth the five-hour plane trip almost by itself. I have always been a fan of its lamps. And look-see here how close the country of Hawaii lets tourists get to its fiery blobness:

 

It’s heartening to know that my intimacy with lava* will be limited only by my own personal stupidity level, and frankly, I think our country could take a lesson from the Hawaiians. Word to the United States, if you don’t allow someone to get eaten by a bear every now and again, all the pot banging in the world will simply fall on deaf ears.

 

An online friend of mine who lives on Oahu says one can spend her whole week’s vacation at Volcanoes National Park and still not see everything worth seeing there. I would contend that one can spend those same seven days plantation-hopping in Kona and still not taste all the coffee worth tasting. Now, le domestique and I have wine-tasted our way up and down the Californy coast, and even still, what I don’t know about wine could fill a book—while other tasters use their little golf pencils to scribble notes like “ashy” and “aggressive tannins,” I keep mental notes of “like” and “did not like”—but about this coffee beverage I am much more discerning. My therapist encourages me to curb caffeine intake—and she has a point; with the neurotransmitters in my gearbox already capable of making my brain rev like a stock car on race day, taking on excess sugar or caffeine is just tempting fate—so when I told her of my planned coffee tour she wondered aloud whether, like wineries, the Kona tasting rooms might better be equipped with spitting tureens. 

 

When wine-tasting one is bound to encounter a tour group or three wherein a dozen or so people are carted from winery to winery by limo or van such that they can eschew the spitting and get completely blotto with impunity. Coffee-tasting obviously harbors dangers of a different sort, so tour maps carry a travelers’ advisory suggesting that it is perhaps wise to participate not only in the tasting opportunities but in any tours offered of the plantation, its harvesting and roasting facilities, and any historical exhibits, thus putting a little distance between one’s cups of caffeine. That all seems reasonable to me; half a dozen plantations on I may be in a frame of mind to bring in a harvest or two. Concurrently, le domestique may be in a frame of mind to force-feed me the anti-anxiety meds I didn’t need for the plane trip over. 

*It turns out my intimacy with lava is also limited by its current trajectory, which is veering inconveniently away from the national park’s edges and really inconveniently toward a couple of straggler houses† in a subdivision previously decimated by lava flow. The only way for touristas like us to see it would be by helicopter. I suppose I could have found this out via a simple Web search weeks ago, but that would have spoiled the searing disappointment I felt on finding this out instead my first morning here.

 

†As homeowners in California, where earthquake coverage is excluded from standard insurance policies and sold as a separate product, we were naturally curious as to whether those poor stragglers were covered for volcanic ire. We learned from a friendly tour operator whose tour we weren’t on but who nevertheless stopped to show us pictures of his own recent lava encounters—because that’s the way Hawaiians roll—that there are three designated lava zones for insurance purposes: He owns a home in zone 2, where he pays approximately double the rate of someone in zone 3, where the danger is most remote; then there’s lava zone 1, in which the doomed subdivision lies, where insurance cannot be had for love or money.

I am posting this on day three of our trip, because that’s how long it took us to stumble across Wi-Fi on the island. Granted, we weren’t trying all that hard, and it’s gratifying to see that there are fewer Starbucks outside the airport than there are inside the airport (three, just in the terminal we came through); on the other hand, we’re in a Starbucks now and are grateful for the Wi-Fi-portunity, so, Mahalo, Starbucks! We are here following a five-hour coffee-tasting marathon (and even I recognize my limits, so I’m currently sipping a green tea lemonade). The tasting experience? There were no spitting tureens. It was awesome. More later!