I sort of just have to come out and say something.

It might not be pretty, you might not agree with it, and you might not like it, but it needs to be said before I write anything else. If it softens the blow, at least know that I feel like a total knob about it (that’s a lie…I feel awesome), and I’m consumed with guilt knowing that something that a ton of people are dying for just fell on my lap (some guilt…but mostly happy explosions of unicorns).

Right. So. On the way home from a road trip with my mom, just after she tried to make me wear her sequined, orange shawl to avoid getting a sunburn through the car window and upon my refusal shouted: “…not gay enough, more like!”, and just before I spent the next four days pacing back and forth in a house all to myself, I got an email.

An email from a literary agent.

An email from a literary agent in New York.

An email from a literary agent in New York who wants to work with me on a book.

Ahem.

I don’t know what your first reactions are like right now but I can tell you that mine were something along the lines of the following:

1. I’M GOING TO GET TO DATE JAKE GYLLENHAAL!

2. OH SHIT SO MANY BLOGGERS ARE GOING TO HATE ME!

3. OH SHIT I’D HATE IF THIS HAPPENED TO ANYONE BUT ME!

4. OH MY GOD THE NERVOUS POOPS!

5. NO BUT SERIOUSLY JAKE GYLLENHAAL?

Yes. It’s true. A real live professional overlooked all my flaws (as if I have any…), saw a glimpse of potential (dumbstruck by my modelesque appearance and flexible morals, no doubt), and asked if I might be interested (ummmmmmmmmmmFUCKYES) in working with her team to come up with something amazing. That is, my dream of maybe potentially perhaps becoming an author someday that I’ve had since I was five might just actually stand a chance at coming true – unlike my dream of becoming a Detective who was also a dog.

It’s not a book deal, there are no promises, and there are still about 3598155 ways that I can screw this up, but it’s a glimmer of hope that’s about to send me on the craziest ride of my life. Aside from that, you just need to know that this agency also represents 50 Cent, Eminem, the guy who had Pluto delisted as a planet, and Lance Bass.

Guess which end of the spectrum I’m on.

In closing, I will take a handful of questions before retiring to a truffle oil bath administered by the entire Spanish World Cup team, each wearing naughty football uniforms made of edible gold – a.k.a. what my life will soon be like assuming that my book will be as widely sold as The Bible which it totally will and don’t you dare try to tell me that it won’t:

• Are you going to be famous? Undoubtedly.
• Will you remember the little people? Most certainly not. I’ll be doing too much coke.
• Can you give me your agent’s contact info? Um. Can you let me dupe her into working on MY book first?.
• How do you go about writing a book? Don’t worry, my ghostwriter will handle it.
• What kind of book will you write? An awesome one that you will love.
• What’s your favourite colour? Stop wasting my time. I’m busy.

Hello boys….

Oh look – ashes! How about I rise out of them like some sort of flaming bird?

….a phoenix, you assholes.

Yes, I’ve pretty much pulled my shit together again after taking a total nosedive on life and it feels good to be back. As much fun as it was to veer so far away from all the things that make me ME that I couldn’t even remember what I who I was in the first place, I much prefer being able to sleep at night, digest food properly, and ohhh you know…smile from time to time. Let’s face it, tragic is not my colour. My colour is clearly Marc Jacobs.

I’ve basically been alone for the past ten days. The newf retreated away from Ben’s Ground Zero to visit his family back in the Promise Land for a while (he comes back tomorrow – finally someone can deal with the insect situation we have going on here. I swear, bugs are getting way too sinister), leaving me to press Ctrl Alt Delete on…well…everything that was getting in the way of the life I wanted to be living. That’s basically a fancy way of saying that I’ve been watching a lot of cartoons, dancing in my underpants, finding mental and physical breakthroughs with a totally granola chiropractor/life-coach/magic woman, and consistently cramping Theo’s style while he tries to be all aloof because I won’t let him go to third base on my eardrum.

So as I move out of the sad and pathetic recovery phase into the progressive rebuilding phase of overachievery, I’ll leave you with a short survival guide to ensure that when you become a living, breathing disaster out of nowhere for no particular reason, your transition is smoother than my own.

1. Get off the grid. Turn off your phone. Shut down your email. Do whatever you need to do to make your own bubble of solitude. Then take that bubble and fill it with a streaming 80s radio station and internet porn. You’ll feel better eventually. Then a little worse. Then a little better again. But mostly worse. It’s all part of the process.

2. Tell someone off who doesn’t deserve it. Think children or the elderly. Or a puppy.

3. Make sure your friends know the difference between Upset You and Loner Zombie You. I chose to communicate this through a series of subtle and cryptic facial expressions that when examined under a blacklight, showed signs of distress beyond the usual, “Lauren Conrad is a bestselling author. My brain refuses to comprehend a world in which that can happen.”

4. Buy something new. Preferably something frivolous that will get you in trouble with the spouse. Like a Brazilian pool boy. Or cocaine.

5. Regurgitate a year of pent-up feelings in obscenely long emails to people that you met through the internet. This is mostly to make other people feel better about the fact that their lives aren’t as off the rails as yours. I mean, just because your life is falling apart doesn’t mean that you can’t make someone else feel nice. IT’S NOT ALWAYS ABOUT YOU.

6. Send me flirty pictures. Hotties only please.

7. Hate a lot of people. I’ve always found the grocery store to be a good place to get this one crossed off the list. Stupid people should all have to shop on the same day. If people need a license to operate a vehicle, they should at least have to perform a written test and interview before being given a shopping cart.

8. Vote for LiLu so she can be the first ever MTV Twitter Jockey. Once she wins, she’ll just have whoever you hate killed. Or at least that’s what she told me.

9. Experiment with your diet. If your life is going to be thrown into upheaval, there may be no better time to give up lattés. You will clearly have nothing to lose by adding a massive, four-day headache into the mix and you’ll appreciate the reduced dairy once the nervous poops kick in.

10. Remember that we’re rooting for you. It can be tough out there. You’ll get through it.

After numerous inquiries about my mental and physical health in relation to what could easily be interpreted as a pervasive bout of alcoholism, I thought it best that I clear the air a teensy tiny bit. While I welcome any and all reality television shows to show up at my home and give me national exposure, I’d prefer if it weren’t a misguided, b-list version of Intervention hell-bent on clearing up my drinking and man-sexing habits in some twisted, two for one special. Although starting up an ‘Ex-Gay’ blog where I consistently post about how often I’m NOT thinking about either of these two pictures would be hilarious.

No, friends, I am not an alcoholic. I am just easily influenced. Say we were to have a big deck party and invite all of the newf’s coworkers who all brought bottles upon bottles of wine and Grey Goose and we never cleaned up afterward, leaving a veritable liquor store strewn across our kitchen and dining room. Hypothetically, were that to happen, one might suggest that I was successful in not succumbing to the constant barrage of DRINK ME’s coming from the area in question more often than not, and can therefore go on living as a reasonable human being without any vices to speak of.

Not counting puppies and cheese.

But like many sober-living gays before me, I have realized that alcohol has its time and place. And that time and place is when you need the courage to sleep with a stranger or go out in public wearing four-inch pumps just to try it or take your mother who hates shopping out to find a dress for a wedding (just kidding mom, you and I both know I was hungover then…not drunk). Every good, weight-fearing homosexual knows that continuous alcohol consumption will simply leave you bloated and squishy which simply doesn’t fit into my plan for the summer.

We have a hammock now – do you even understand how terrible it looks when you have red, bold fishnet print indented into your love handles after a nap? REALLY TERRIBLE.

So there. Let’s put it to rest. If I’m going to get put into rehab for anything, it should be for Applewood Cheddar and good European Swiss. And maybe the Internet and Miley Cyrus’ new album. And at the very least for all that gas that I huff before I go to sleep. And for hating strangers and ugly people and dumb people. But not drinking – THAT I have under control.

Cheers.

DAMNIT!

Guys? GUYS. Guys. This is big. Right here, right now, I’m experiencing a moment in which I actually know what I want. In fact, I know so much so that I could make a reality competition in which myself and a panel of B-list judges could do a nation-wide search for it. These moments rarer for me than flattering angles are for Sarah Jessica Parker.

It struck me while I was unattractively drunk and ordering Coors Light (ugh…I said I’ll have whatever she’s having, not realizing that ‘she’ was a lesbian) from drag queens at a place called Menz Bar. I had just spent twenty minutes trying to drunk dial my best gay friend Nick in Toronto, thereby defeating the easy, carefree qualities that make drunk dialing so appealing with each failed area code combination, when I had a vision. Except it wasn’t so much a vision as it was three hairy, fat, sweaty, naked, old men going at each other in an out-of-the-way bathroom, squatting and rummaging around as if they were looking for change in the cracks of an old car seat if that car seat were to have back hair and be wearing a leather harness that somehow strapped onto his junk.

Yes. Apparently such things really do happen at gay bars from time to time. Who knew?

Like any good friend, or pet cat who proudly drops dead mice off on your pillow at night, I run back to my group shouting things like, “SEX ACTS! LIVE SEX ACTS! OH MY GOD! I SAW THEM! GO LOOK! OLD MAN THREESOME! HURRY BEFORE THEY FINISH!” when I start to realize that I wasn’t going to get the response I wanted – that being, “EW! Seriously? No – but for serious? Are you seriously serious? EW! Which bathroom? The one in the back? To the left? BRB! EWWWW! Did you see the one with the piercing?! HAHAHA!”

I mean, isn’t that what we all want when we stumble across old people orgies? Someone to share in the experience to make it a lasting memory that we definitely won’t tell our kids about someday? [Pause to wonder if my parents have ever accidentally found three gay bears in a loving, lubed-up embrace and never bothered to tell me. Cause they could if they wanted to. I'm not like other sons. I'm a COOL son.] Instead, I got scrunched up faces and tilted heads over the fact that I even thought to bring this treasure back to their attention. No one, nadda, not one of them thought to go look so that we could discuss their technique at length over greasy brunch in the morning.

This is a problem.

Seeing as we’re headed into summer, the season of the kind of love that requires protective goggles, I need friends who know that if I’m going to stay out past midnight, if I’m going to have to wipe drag queen lipstick off my face, if I’m going to have to pretend to know how to dance to mid-tempo R&B, I’m going to need people by my side who know how to make it all worth it when I direct everyone’s attention to the full-fledged fetish film going on a mere FIVE STEPS FROM WHERE WE ARE STANDING.

Is that too much to ask? Is it unfair of me to think that if I’m going to be hungover because YOU wanted to go dancing, that I’d like to be hungover laughing about how old gay men think it’s cool to drop trou in front of a bunch of urinals for happy-fun-time thanks to a cocktail of prescription and herbal ‘libido’ supplements and a soundtrack of remixed Ke$ha?

I didn’t think so. It’s time to man up, friends. Just like that slightly smaller fat old man manned up for the other two fat old men. I didn’t think he’d be able to hold all that weight on just one leg and a few fingers on the bottom of the urinal.

We all have to do our part.

[Photo Credit: rnav1234]

We interrupt your regular programming for a 50-second celebration of Calvin’s third birthday and the inexplicable miracle that I actually remembered it coming to pass this year. Please join me in enjoying serene, adorable moving images of my dog juxtaposed with ecstasy-fueled club music. You know. Just ’cause.

Okay. So whose job was it to warn me about turning 25? Was it you? Or you? Someone needs to come clean so I know who to punch in the face with a Birken bag filled with rocks. And OH YES I AM still having a metaphysical breakdown as I slowly become consumed with my self-perpetuated shortcomings, thankyouverymuch. I’m just that kind of guy.

My entire life hurts right now and has for basically the past month. I just wrapped my fourth consecutive 60+ hour work week, I’m so consumed by stress that I have the spins, the shakes, the shits, the shingles and everything in between, and my life is so thrown out of balance that I don’t even know what to do with myself. Like I am actually, absolutely, 100% out of solutions, out of directions, and out of the positive momentum that might suggest an alternative to all my ideas that seem to start with running away to a country no one has ever heard of before and changing my name to Geraldo with a silent ‘G’.

Ever feel so uncomfortable in your own skin twenty-four hours a day that every single thing you do becomes exhausting? That’s me right now. Something is so out of whack that every second of the day feels wrong. Like I’m the idiot in the movie who runs upstairs at the sight of danger, or convinces the virgins that nothing bad will happen if they all conduct a sexual ritual on the indian burial ground. I’m honestly looking around corners to see an audience full of people screaming, “SHIT NO! WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? DON’T DO THAT! BITCH YOU GON’ DIE!”

And yes, I know, I most certainly have spent the better part of the past twenty-five years of my life chasing (and finding) highs and lows so surely in some way I’ve brought all of this upon myself. Ambition and high expectations seem to be intrinsically linked with frustration and failure – which explains how I seem to ricochet between amazing to disaster more times before breakfast than the average person in their entire lifespan. But I really don’t know the first thing about settling for a happy medium…or if I even want to.

All I know is something is broken and I have to fix it. Or, something is what it is and what it always will be, and I need to break it. Also…don’t fucking read ‘Eat, Pray, Love’. Just don’t. I’m pretty much blaming Liz Gilbert for all of this. She’s so going to get Birkenrocked.

And no, this whole post wasn’t just for that pun. That was just a happy surprise for us both.

Exclude the newf from all sweeping ‘life sucks’ comments made above. He continues to be incredible and patient. OH THE PATIENCE! But seriously…stop liking him more than me. I see all you bitches making him the top search term on this whole goddamn blog and I don’t appreciate it. He smells bad.

[Photo Credit: Greything]

[The problem with blogging is that you're constantly cockblocking your character and reputation in the future without even realizing it until all of a sudden you're scrolling back through your online writing to find a particular gem that captures the now ever-embarrassing early twenties era. This is made worse by the realization that this particular post not only launched you into a temporary freelance writing career, but could also be considered the earliest form of the blog you still maintain four years later. Now, without apologies, excuses or explanations, I have reposted that very piece here in order to provide a debaucherous context for the Version 2.0 written for you below wherein I try to explain the frequent occurrence of a phenomenon entirely out of my control.]

For any of you who follow me on Twitter, this should come as no surprise but, occasionally (often), I get drunk by accident. No but seriously. Stay with me here. It’s a thing. IT’S A THING*. And I’m going to tell you all about it so that you can achieve it in your own lives, thereby shirking all responsibilities, stigmas and red flags of drinking by one’s self on a weeknight and then attempting to hide it from one’s loved ones while simultaneously broadcasting it to the internet. I mean so that you can avoid it. Yes – the second one.

First off, let it be known that I don’t believe in needing a special occasion to drink a glass of wine and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The problem, or shall we say OPPORTUNITY, is that while I find red wine much more appropriate for a relaxing, end of a workday drink while I read GQ and try to convince myself that all the models’ faces and bodies have been photoshopped within an inch of their lives, thereby justifying the fact that I just ate Five Cheese Stuffed Jumbo Shells, I am the only permanent residence of my home who drinks red wine. Thus, when I open a bottle, I’m committing to drinking it over the next two nights because that’s the arbitrary amount of time in which I’ve decided an open bottle of wine is at its best.

While I have no issue throwing away recyclables and slowly killing the polar bears and low-lying countries of the world, I refuse to let a bottle of wine go to waste – I mean please…I’m not a monster – and perhaps put unnecessary pressure on myself to consume. And consume quickly.

Sitting there, making myself feel particularly vulnerable thanks to the fine stylings of European fashion, I’ll enjoy a single, potentially over-poured glass of wine in my ideal environment of clean surfaces and low-lighting with sleeping puppy accoutrements. It is at times like these that I feel proud of how far I’ve come – the sights of blinding strobe lights, the sounds of tribal drum and bass remixes, and the taste of vodka-flavoured death seem like distant memories of a colourful youth. I might even start feeling a little smug in how refined I’ve become.

And five minutes later I. Am. HAMMERED.

Word-slurring, computer screen-blurring, back to the kitchen for a second, third and fourth glass tip-toeing, BedRock rapping HAMMERED.

The thing with all of a sudden realizing that you’re not just ‘give it twenty minutes and it’ll fade‘ buzzed, but rather ‘holy shit I should probably start thinking about hangover breakfast‘ d-runk, is that it’s really fucking funny at the time and very easy to convince yourself that you should probably just finish the bottle of wine because well…what else are you going to do with it?

Just like that, you’re drunk enough to hit the dancefloor only you don’t have a dancefloor – you just have a Blackberry, an internet account and two tired dogs who by all accounts are not amused about the whole situation. All of a sudden reality hits: you’re sleep with the best man at your sister’s wedding soused and have to figure out how in the sweet name of Shiraz you’re going to explain this to your spouse when he gets bored of science fiction re-runs/preparing lesson plans/looking at topless guys on Facebook/reading the entire universe of wikipedia articles on the potential for light-speed space travel as written by Stephen Hawking. Or whatever normal boyfriends busy themselves with. Sports? Porn? Pooping?

The answer is one that I’m not proud of – you can’t explain it. You just can’t. Sober people don’t understand anything a person who has just drank an entire bottle of wine on a Wednesday has to say about why they just drank an entire bottle of wine on a Wednesday. No…you have to hide it making for a deliciously entertaining evening of revisiting eleventh grade drinking protocol: avoid, distract, blatantly lie.

“My lips are red because I just made out with a clown.”

“I’m slurring my words because I had a really hard day. Why can’t you just be supportive?”

“No, I did not just fall. You did. Shut up. Stop falling, fall-y.”

“Isn’t a guy allowed to collapse on the dog bed until the spins pass anymore?”

“Everyone loads up RENT videos and has a good cry every now and then…”

If you act weird/passive-aggressive/straight-up insane enough, they’ll likely leave you alone, blaming it on a bad day at the office. Then all you have to do is kick back and relax until you can safely stumble into bed to focus on more important things like not throwing up before morning. If you fail at this, try convincing them that you got a concussion earlier that day – just something clever I tried (unsuccessfully) back in high school.

Most importantly, whenever you accidentally get yourself in this situation – because what sort of sick person would ever do something like this on purpose or say just for sport? – you need to make sure to use ample forms of social media. Why? Because interacting with people on Twitter means that you’re not drinking alone. Also, it’s fun for the rest of us to make fun of you the next day when you’re all, “FUCK ME HOW DID THAT HAPPEN MY HEAD OH MY HEAD #ijustwantdeath“.

Or at least all of you seem to enjoy that part.

So there you have it. How to get drunk by yourself. I mean, how to avoid getting drunk by yourself because that’s a bad, bad thing and not at all funny or something I do on a regular basis or something I actively prepare for by buying expensive cheeses because if you add cheese to any wine scenario it becomes a classy affair and not at all tawdry or socially problematic. And if it were to happen, I certainly wouldn’t lie about it to the newf or finish the whole bottle by myself or watch live videos of Kelly Clarkson until 2am or get shifty eyes from my coworkers the next morning as I clutch a greasy breakfast sandwich in one hand and a bottle of Advil in the other and a plastic bag lined garbage under my desk.

That would never happen…repeatedly…on purpose…because I think it’s funny.

Who said what now?

[*No seriously. It IS a thing because Jamie and Nicole told me in Vegas that they do it too and while 'three's a crowd', three's also enough to make something a THING rather than one person with problematic behavioural habits when it comes to the consumption of alcohol. And holy shit am I ever going to have to delete the bejesus out of this entire goddamn blog should we ever try to adopt a child...]

Photo Credit: Mr. T in DC]

Okay. Fine. It was my birthday on Friday. Are you happy now? I am twenty-fucking-five which, in gay world, means that since I have not launched my own fashion line, condo building, reality show, or gold-digging affair with a figurehead of a vocally anti-gay religious network, I am entirely irrelevant and insignificant. It’s pathetic really.

And yes – I get it. I’m doing just fine for my age, I should feel proud of myself, and blah blah blah when you were my age you were doing lines of cocaine off the skeleton key that Hobo Joe insisted would open the door to his cardboard shanty pimpshack so I should shut up with the Bridget Jones shit but NO. There’s more to it than that. Being a twenty-something today means holding yourself to much higher standards than ever before.

For example, I see no flaw in the logic that suggests that next to 24-year-old Lady Gaga, I am a complete disappointment. And the fact that I only have three years to catch up with 28-year-old Beyoncé does not bode well for the amount of no-pants outfits I’m going to have to rock starting immediately. Don’t even talk to me about Mark Zuckerberg – he’s a goddamn billionaire and is not nearly attractive enough to deserve it, if you ask me. I was voted Sexiest Blogger for crissakes! GIVE ME $4 BILLION!

But unlike them, instead of watching my bank account slowly surpass those of most third-world countries, releasing a new number one album, or wearing teacups and coke cans in my hair, I spent my 25th birthday cleaning up pug feces, and delivering a social media seminar to a room of 25 people during which I blamed Twitter for showing us all that John Mayer is a complete and utter rottencrotch, and used the term “all up in this” at least twice.

And frankly, the lot of you aren’t helping either what with your book deals, being full time self-employed, traveling the world on the daily, and generally putting my life into terrible perspective. Whatever happened to the twenty-something bloggers who would spend their last $20 getting into a club so they could have a one-night-stand so someone would buy them breakfast the next morning? THOSE ARE THE STORIES I NEED TO HEAR RIGHT NOW.

On the plus side, this birthday has resulted in a Starbucks gift card that is ballin’ out of control. I’m starting to buy Ventis just to throw at teenagers running around like their sixpacks and skinny jeans will last forever. They won’t. Eventually, you’ll be me and it will suck for you. And it’ll probably suck for me me since I’ll be dead by then. And by dead, I mean thirty.

Respect your elders, bitch.

[Photo Credit: Libertinus]

In seventh grade, a young Canadian had just moved back to a soccer mom community on the East Coast after spending three years gallivanting about a sheep and cheese farming island off the Northern coast of The Netherlands. Like all pubescent tragedies, this one story wasn’t pretty. It was filled with realizations for our dear hero – realizations like, dutch accents are not considered cool when everyone else is trying to look, act and sound the same. And having a tremendous fondness for the Spice Girls and knowing each of their full names and style influences is not something a thirteen-year-old boy should boast about.

Remember, this was a pre-Gaga world.

After seven months or so of slowly learning just how uncool he was – actually, let’s take this shit into first person because eventually I’m going to screw it up and everyone will be confused even though you all knew that I was talking about me this whole time and were just being polite – I stumbled across my way in. You know…’IN’. Like, people-might-not-spend-all-day-circling-me-like-a-pack-of-vulture-hyena-crossbreeds-with-a-tremendous-vocabulary-when-it-came-to-synonyms-for-gay, ‘IN’.

I started writing.

It wasn’t anything special, groundbreaking, or creative. It was hand-scrawled across loose leaf pages that would get more and more crinkled as they were passed around the class while we all tried to avoid learning anything related to Canadian railroad or fur trappers. They may have aged faster than Lindsay Lohan, but those pages? They were my coup.

It was a simple story about mobsters set in the twenties with questionable historical accuracy. There were killings, betrayals, sex (or at least what I thought sex was which basically boiled down to steamed up windows and eggs in the morning), and way too many clichés. Each chapter would be about six pages, front and back, and would end on cliffhangers worthy of a Goosebumps paperback about a killer picture frame.

But with each of the characters modeled and named after one of the cool kids? You’d think I had recast the Bible with Leonardo DiCaprio circa Titanic and Mariah Carey circa the Heartbreaker remix.

And all of a sudden, things were different. They’d be tripping over themselves to make sure they wouldn’t get killed off in the next chapter as I wrote it in health class, or dropping hints to make their next love interest in the story would be their real life crushes. It was superficial and it faded once the story stopped, but even when the pages stopped turning and I could finally start feeling my fingers again, I was still slightly better off on the social ladder than I was before and it felt pretty good.

And I really don’t think I’ve really ever given it a tremendous amount of thought until just now.