I’m always the last to know.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Case in point: Star Wars. When it came to my lil’ ol’ town when I was a wee laddie, I had no idea what it was about. One of my friends just asked if I wanted to go, and being your average grammar school kid eternally on the lookout for something to do, I naturally said yes.

Now, if I’d walked into that film fully aware of what I was about to see, my expectations might have been too high. As it was, however, I emerged from the theater with a completely new appreciation for cinema and special effects. Being clueless about the whole thing obviously worked in my favor.

The same goes for Dungeons and Dragons. If I’d known in 7th grade that the cool kids considered D&D a game for the terminally unhip and socially challenged, I’d have cast a more jaundiced eye on Miss Cooley, the quirky lady with the impish grin who taught a small class of “gifted” students in a closet-sized classroom in the junior high basement that reeked of formaldehyde. (Note: I wasn’t terribly gifted myself, but my school had a policy that students had to take either P.E. or band, and since I wanted nothing to do with either, my father arranged for me to enroll in the gifted program instead. Thanks, daddy.)

As it was, however, when Miss Cooley began putting us through the paces of hit points and charisma levels and 20-sided dice, I was completely charmed. D&D lacked the pizzazz of Defender or Pac Man, but it was way better than Candyland or Mousetrap or any boardgame. For the next six years, I was hooked.

So it is without [much] irony that I can say today, Happy birthday, D&D!” In turning me into a social pariah, you provided me with many enjoyable hours during my most acne-prone years.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, as of tonight, they’re baaack!

I could be getting out the vote. I could be pressing flesh and working a room. Or at the very least, I could be striking and spiking (’cause I’ve worked in theatre before, and I know the lingo).

Instead, I’m thinking about the 32-page Memorandum of Understanding drawn up by the Bush and Kerry camps to govern the presidential (and vice presidential) debates. Specifically, I’m wondering…

• Did the Memorandum insist that both Bush and Kerry wear dark suits? ‘Cause John Kerry’s clearly a “winter” and can pull that shit off, but GW’s advisor oughtta be shot–it’s painfully obvious that he’s an “autumn,” people! I think a nice russet-colored crew-neck sweater would have better captured the healthy ruddiness of his cheeks and the bloodthirsty glint in his hawkish, beady eyes. Not to mention the effect such things could have on one of his key demographics: I mean, everybody knows that a sweater is the key to a soccer mom’s heart.
• Did the Memorandum insist that both candidates wear white shirts? ‘Cause even with their expensive, sporty, fakebake tans, the shirts came off looking cheap–like button-down, oxford-cloth, Hagar-sales-rack-crap. They made Kerry and Bush look like nothing so much as gigolo waiters on the Riviera, each hoping to suck the money–and, as a necessary evil, certain bodily fluids–out of lonely, well-heeled widows and widowers.
• Did the Memorandum insist that tie choices be limited to red and blue? And did it indicate which candidate could wear which color to each debate? See, I was under the impression that green is the new orange, which, a few short years ago, was itself the new black. And, frankly, I’d rather have a fashion-conscious president who’s a little more sartorially adventurous instead of a leader whose complete commitment to 80s-esque power ties is bound to encourage behind-the-back laughter from allies we really need right now–notably the French, Italians, and Germans.

Now, if none of this is set out in the Memorandum, what does that say about men’s clothing and power? That the only way to convey gravitas is via a navy suit and monochromatic tie? Count me out, Mary–I’ll hang with the aesthetes.

Of course, if I were so inclined, I could sit down and actually read the damn thing, but why would a lazy schmoe like me wanna do something like that?

I don’t take enough pictures. I never have.

Now, I’m not a terribly sentimental kind of guy. I’m not really materialistic either, in the sense that I don’t need things like ticket stubs or pressed boutonnieres or scrapbooks full of photographs to make me feel complete or to document my half-lived life. I’m generally fine with my memories, thank you very much. In fact, most of the time I find photos to be a let-down: in my head, I’ve got a clear picture of past events, warm and gooey and happy, but then I pull out a photo and it’s somehow different, it doesn’t look right. What can I do? Argue? Photos don’t lie, and that’s their shortcoming.

Still, I wish I had a few pictures of my friend Jay.

Jay moved to New Orleans not long after I did. He was the ex-boyfriend of my then-boyfriend, Martin. Out of the blue one day he called us and said he was tired of Tampa and wanted a change of scenery. We offered him our sofa for as long as he wanted to stay–and what a stay he had….

Jay flourished here. As a drag artiste working in the genderfuck style, Jay–or Goddess, as he was better known–was celebrated for his quirky performances and his faux-messy, Kiki-esque antics. He was a beautiful dancer, too, classically trained in ballet, with an arabesque to make Nijinsky weep. He may not have always remembered the words to the songs he was lip-synching, but you couldn’t help but watch.

In person, Jay wasn’t too different–funny, giddy, always cutting up. The messiness offstage, however, was all too real. Smoking and drinking ’till dawn seven nights a week isn’t terribly healthy for anyone, let alone folks with compromised immune systems.

Anyway, Jay left New Orleans a few years back, and to be honest, I hadn’t thought of him much until this morning, when I received phone calls from two different sources verifying that he had passed away. And as I listened to the frustratingly vague details of his death, something in me snapped. Suddenly I was very sad and very angry that I never took a single picture of him on the stage at Lucky Cheng’s as he churned out his own rendition of Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” for the upteenth time. That I never snapped a pic of him perched on his barstool upstairs at the Pub, downing shots with the bartender, Roberto. That I have not one photo of him at all.

All I can do is sit here at my desk and listen to Sinead O’Connor’s “Red Football” and imagine Jay spinning deliriously atop the stage at MRB like a whirling dervish on too much meth, the thin, shiny heels of his PVC stilettos creeping closer and closer to the edge of the platform until it looks like certain doom, when suddenly he hurls himself into the air and lands with his back pressed against the upstage, mirrored wall in a gesture as grand and as final as Isadora Duncan tossing that tragically long scarf over her delicate shoulder as she stepped into her Bugatti for the very last time.

We’ll miss you, Jay. Wherever you are, I hope you’re turning it out.

Not surprisingly, John Waters, a Baltimore native, is an admirer of the sometimes blood-splattered dioramas…. “Even the most depraved Barbie Doll collector couldn’t top this.”

—New York Times

A Dozen Passing Thoughts

1. Q: How do you drive a Dane crazy?
A: Drop her off at the Robert’s by my house and force her to read the checkout ladies’ nametags ’till she starts climbing the produce displays. (Note: Does not apply to Brigitte Nielsen, who’s clearly already nuts.)

2. Courtesy of my favorite nonprofit, the American Family Association, I received a link to this PDF list of AFA ass-kissers running for public office in Louisiana this November. According to the email, Msr. Wildmon & Co. would really appreciate it if I printed it out and distributed photocopies to my nearest and dearest [non-dancing, non-drinking, missionary-style-loving] friends. I’m tempted to do just that–after making some minor changes, of course…

3. …Oh, screw it. Like I’ve got time for ten more of these. We open tonight!

Well <a href="http://www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-2/109704586449110.xml&quot; target="ss" title="Same-sex marriage ban nullified

“>that brightens my day a bit. We’ll see if it lasts.

For those of you who haven’t yet discovered the most recent additions to the Gawker/Nick Denton fine family of blogs, may I suggest a gander at Kotaku and/or Screenhead? It’s thanks to them that I recently experienced the most boring videogame in the history of the world (Yar’s Revenge excluded, of course) and the most disturbing art project I’ve ever seen–and honey, I’ve seen plenty.

May goddess have mercy on our souls.

There’s an article in this month’s National Geographic about the Phoenicians and how their vast, vibrant society was soundlessly absorbed by other cultures along the Mediterranean. The reporter tagged along with a couple of scientists using DNA tests to find descendants of the Phoenicians, and the magazine published a two-page pull-out featuring portraits of potential candidates. The pull-out was interesting because, although I don’t really have the same facial features as the (mostly Lebanese) men shown there, I do have the same eyes. It kinda makes me wanna just hop on a plane and go door-to-door in Beirut, looking for my bio-father.

But that’s not why I brought up the article. No, I brought up the article because I fell asleep reading the damn thing, and when the boyfriend woke me up several hours later as he rolled into bed, he saw what I’d been reading, and without skipping a beat, he began singing “My Phoenician guy…Oh!” (to the tune of Grace Jones’ always popular “My Jamaican Guy”).

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is love. Or delirium. Or a particular variety of psychosis. Who can say, really?