Tuesday, April 27, 2004
Obscene Interiors
Ooo, baby, that's a mighty big chifforobe but what's with the chintz?: My dear friend and spiritual adviser
Eric sent me a copy of
Justin Jorgensen's new book,
Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Décor, personally inscribed by the author and with a kicky foreward by interiors dude
Todd Oldham his own self. It is, of course, the dead-tree cousin of
this site, a pretty book filled with pretty wretched home "decorating" that's such fun to read.
(Justin's site also has a great gallery of pages from
The Witch's Catalog, one of my favorite books as a wee sprout. Oh, how I wanted an Invisible Suit!)
April 27, 2004 at 7:04 PM
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Reading
George gets head
Dubya's bald head fetish: OK, given
the secretive Yale background of our "president", I can halfway understand
his obsession with men's skulls. If they exist, though, for the sake of my sanity and digestion, please let's not see pictures of George W. Bush grabbing guys' bones.
Thank you.
April 27, 2004 at 4:55 PM
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General
Brad, Texas
I've been to paradise, but I've never been to
me.
This might be worth a summer road trip.
April 27, 2004 at 2:48 PM
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Me
A few links
Clearing the cache: A few bookmarks I've accumulated over the past week or so...
April 27, 2004 at 12:49 AM
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Clearing the Cache
Monday, April 26, 2004
More thoughts on challenge questions
More thoughts on challenge questions: Lest I be accused of Google-bashing (as a couple of correspondents have lightly inferred), so far I think GMail is the tits. As I've discovered (and as
Matt Haughey points out), the ability to
compromise a webmail account by answering another person's "challenge question" is not unique to GMail. Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail seem to have similar problems.
The basic problem is that we, the fallible humans, when given a chance to secure the account, pick poor challenge questions, queries that are easily researched by uncovering information we've made available about ourselves. My mother's maiden name is out there on the web, tied to my own name, and vulnerable to a simple Google search. So is a lot of personal information about me, much of it published right here — and freely so — on this very website. So I've chosen a challenge question for GMail that's unlikely to be answerable by anyone but me: the full name of my first love. Considering even
he didn't know he was my first love (I never 'fessed up) and I've never spilled the beans to anyone (when describing my romantic past, I start with my second love), this is extremely uncommon knowledge.
So really, it's incumbent on us when securing our accounts — webmail, banking, website FTP or what have you — to think creatively about crafting the questions, passwords or other security measures we use. (
Dan Budiac has been thinking about this too.)
Even assuming we all pick inscrutable, arcane questions as our first line of defense, consider that the task of making forgotten or misplaced passwords easily recoverable for the user isn't an easy one, for Google or anyone. For a lot of folks, once it becomes widely available, GMail will become a lot of people's primary or only e-mail account. They can't rely on the notion that many or most users will have a secondary account to which they can send a new password.
What are the options? At the university where I teach, if you forget your password, you have to request a new one in person at the Registrar's office and provide a lot of ID or you request one on the web and it's sent by postal mail to your home address. I'd have to jump through similar hoops with my bank (which will take a phone request, but still mails the new password) and charge card companies. I doubt Google, large and powerful though they may become, is prepared to run a tech support phone line for people to recover their passwords for a free web service.
I don't know what all the answers are and, aside from suggesting we choose unanswerable-but-by-us challenge questions, I'm fresh out of ideas. Maybe it's multiple tiers of challenge questions, maybe it's something with cookies and smart cards. Maybe it's something else.
What I do know is it's a toughie and I'm glad I'm just a user who can prod more savvy minds than mine to consider it.
April 26, 2004 at 5:47 PM
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General
A Conversation From the Bar Scene
Chuck: I was checking out the website for those new lofts. Unfortunately, it looks like they have concrete floors.
Brad: What?!
Chuck: They have concrete floors.
Brad: Oh. For a minute there, I thought you said cock ring floors.
Chuck: Shows where your mind is. Anyway, if I'm going to live there, I'd rather have hardwood.
Brad: Then it sounds like a floor made of cock rings would come in handy.
April 26, 2004 at 4:33 PM
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Conversations
Browser Window Lock
Browser feature request: I keep a lot of windows open on my desktop: word processing files, web pages (in one or more different browsing applications), e-mail, instant messages, other document files. More and more of my work is done using web applications inside a browser and, given my fumble-fingers, I often hit the keystroke for closing a window accidentally, consigning to oblivion a lot of work that's not easy to retrieve.
I'd like a way to "lock" a browser window or tab so that it couldn't be closed without my confirming that's really what I want to do.
For example, I don't like the distraction of the radio while I'm working, so I often keep open a browser window to the nifty
St. Louis Cardinals GameDay play-by-play webcast. But one slip of the thumb and it vanishes, leaving me to dig through the site to find it again and relaunch. Likewise with applications I'd love to keep open most of the time, such as
Movable Type or
GMail.
For now, my solution is inelegant: I do most of my browsing in Safari and keep Firefox running with my chosen web apps in the background. Still, at least once or twice a day, I manage to accidentally close windows in the wrong application. "D'oh!" has become a common utterance around my office.
Can't someone put in a checkbox that means "Don't close this window unless I both press Command-W
and answer affirmatively to a dialog box? Or does this feature exist and I'm just missing it?
April 26, 2004 at 3:31 PM
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General
More GMail observations
More on GMail: I've had some further opportunity to play with
GMail and continue to be impressed with the overall elegance of the system. While some have raised concerns about accessibility and privacy, I'm willing to accept that this is a beta product
and an opt-in service and wait to see what the final version(s) looks like before nailing it to the cross.
In general, once you become accustomed to GMail's organizational metaphors (no folders, for example, but a labelling system and robust keyword searching), you want the rest of the world to work that way too. My company's internal webmail application feels like stone tools by comparison and although I've been using Eudora on the desktop in more or less the same fashion (little rigid organization but using the search facility extensively), Google's approach just feels a lot more intuitive and usable.
The ads don't bother me or intrude in the least.
They've begun phasing in support for
Safari, too, which rocks my socks. It's not perfect but, hey, beta. (The opening screen still claims "Gmail does not currently support your browser" but if you click through to "sign in anyway", most of the features — including keyboard shortcuts — work just fine.)
Finally, today I received my first and so far only piece of spam at my GMail address (after posting my address here three days ago). It was not automagically filtered into the spam box.
April 26, 2004 at 2:42 PM
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General
Friday, April 23, 2004
My GMail Address
"First contact is not what it used to be": With gratitude to my Google benefactor, I'll announce that I now have a
GMail account at
thebrad@gmail.com.
I'm just testing it at the moment. If I like the service and its spam filtering is up to snuff, I may make the above my contact address for this website.
April 23, 2004 at 6:08 PM
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Meta
GMail Security Flaw
GMail security flaw: I just discovered a rather serious security flaw in Google's
GMail service, currently in beta. If I wanted, right now, I could access the mailboxes of at least a dozen people, alter their user information, send e-mail using their address and otherwise generally fuck up their accounts.
I won't, of course. But if someone as essentially tech-clueless as I can do it, I rather imagine more savvy and unscrupulous parties are ready and waiting to exploit this weakness.
Further: It's not a technical flaw with the GMail system. It's a combination of poor user interaction design and a little social hacking that opens up the system to potential abuse.
I was poking around the
GMail site, just to see if by some miracle they'd opened sign-ups and not told anyone. (They haven't.) But I clicked on everything that I could, including the link under the login panel asking "Forgot your password?"
That takes me to a page where I'm asked to "enter the email address you use to login." At random, I picked the address of a friend I knew had recently obtained a GMail test account and submitted it. I then had to pass one of those tests where a graphic of a word or nonsense phrase is displayed and you have to type it into a box to prove you're a human and not a computer.
After doing that, I'm presented with a security question, presumably one chosen by the GMail user to further verify their identity and help them recover their password. This is where the system starts to break down. Several people have custom questions, unique to them and requiring somewhat intimate information about themselves. In the case of the random friend's account I'd plugged in earlier, it was something I knew about them off the top of my head. If I didn't, though, I'd easily be able to ascertain the answer by reading their website.
I gather that "What is your Mother's maiden name?" is one of the default security questions. It's a bad one. In the case of at least three friends, I didn't know it but was able to easily obtain it by plugging their names into, yes, Google and having the information spit back to me from publicly accessible genealogy websites.
Now having a security question isn't a bad thing, per se. It's just not very tight security, particularly when many of the people using the service are, themselves, web publishers and have chosen particularly poor questions with easily researched answers as the key to their account. But it still requires a little effort; it's not as though a simple computer program could batch through dozens of accounts and compromise them. It requires a thinking, Googling human to get past the security question.
Ah, but when you do! In other systems, passing this hurdle would generate an e-mail to a second account, either revealing the password or containing instructions for resetting it. With GMail, though, I'm immediately presented with the option of resetting the password. Input a new password twice, click submit and voila: I'm in charge of another person's account.
This makes GMail extremely insecure.
There are two ways to address this. First, if you're using GMail right now, I'd suggest choosing a security question to which
only you know the answer and which is not answerable by Googling for information about you. (Good advice always, but particularly in this case.) Mothers' maiden names are right out. Names of first pets? Suspect, when a lot of us have taken and published the results of "What is your drag queen name?" quizzes on our websites. Old phone number? Probably tucked away in a long-forgotten, never-updated online database.
The second is for Google to tighten up the process by requiring password changes to involve an e-mail challenge or some other means of resetting an account password. Knowing a person's GMail address and a little personal info about them is too low a hurdle to put the reset mechanism front-and-center where it is now.
At last count, I could easily compromise the accounts of six friends, six prominent webloggers, a Google employee and one random fellow I've never met or heard of.
I haven't and I won't. And another Google employee has graciously invited me to take a test account, which offer I'll accept, even though I wish the service worked with Safari so I could really get under the hood.
In the meantime, I won't be trusting GMail for anything critical and I'll be picking a completely unanswerable (except by me) password security question. I'd advise you to do the same.
April 23, 2004 at 12:43 AM
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General
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
Too racy for Walgreens
My recent headaches are only partially sinus- and allergy-related. I've been clutching my skull in frustration and disbelief, too, at news of matters large and small.
This story is emblematic.
Johnson doesn't understand how anyone could be offended by his photo of Ammell. He doesn't even care, really. He just knows that he lost a friend, and now his best photograph is only in his head.
April 21, 2004 at 10:26 PM
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General
Gay for payday
Meet me for brunch?
October 11, 2004.
April 21, 2004 at 12:57 AM
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GBLT
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
420
Happy 4/20: It's my favorite spring
holiday! I'll be taking a long "lunch" today in
celebration and mailing off my annual donation to
NORML.
April 20, 2004 at 11:48 AM
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General
Monday, April 19, 2004
Conversation starter
I may throw like a girl but I'm still a damn good pitcher. Here, friends, is a 100 percent unsolicited endorsement of the
finest conversation-starting garment currently available in these United States, courtesy of the irrepressible
mighty Maggie.
I was pleased to be among the first to own one and I can attest to its attention-grabbing, introduction-earning powers, having modeled it in a variety of homosexual drinking establishments in both St. Louis and Chicago. The boys practically
throw their phone numbers at you, kids!
Order today!
April 19, 2004 at 10:16 PM
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Recommended
Season in review
We wrapped up our season at
the theatre this weekend and said "so long" to two marvelous casts. For the past few years, it's been a personal tradition to take some time to reflect on the shows I saw over the past few months and pick out my highlights. I've always made notes to this effect in my personal, private memoirs but I suppose there's no reason not to share my impressions here as well.
It's not easy to sort through 182 ticket stubs — surpassing 1998's high of 176 — and choose my personal bests and disappointments. But I generally wait until the season's end to do it, figuring that the impressions that linger in my mind sometimes months after the fact are the strongest and most true.
Please note that the list is in no particular order, that I've pitched in a couple of concerts, and that I'm including the good, the bad and the "meh".
Bounce: 
I saw this show three times during the season, twice at the Goodman in Chicago and once during it's run at the Kennedy Center. Flawed though it may be, I have a soft spot for it still, thanks to the infectious title tune, the absolutely charming Richard Kind as Addison Mizner and the always delicious Gavin Creel as Hollis. Howard McGillin was a bit out of his depth as the more scheming of the two Mizners; I kept wondering what the show would have felt like if Nathan Lane had reprised the role after tearing into it with gusto in the 1999 OB workshop I saw, back when it was still Wise Guys. (Unfortunately, I figure Richard Kind would have been eaten alive in the midst of the scenery chewing.) Bounce didn't make it to Broadway — with cause — but I'm looking forward to the cast album, recorded in Washington, which will be released next month.
Wicked: I didn't dislike this show as much as some of my friends — one of whom absolutely loathed it — and I didn't adore it as much as the gaggle of rabid show queens I ran into in Chicago last week. But I thought it had a lot to recommend it, especially considering its scant nods to the source material and a decidedly lackluster Stephen Schwartz score. Idina Menzel gave, as always, a simply fabulous performance as Elphaba and Kristin Chenowith was an appropriately bubbly Galinda (although she seemed to be treating the show as her audition piece for Legally Blonde: The Musical. I can understand why it continues to pack the Gershwin night after night. Still, meh.
The Boy From Oz: I saw this in the company of some particularly enthusiastic Hugh Jackman fans — although I'm not sure there's a night at the Imperial when you can't say that — and it was boon fun. Jackman is fantastic, the production numbers are appropriately over-the-top as befits their provenance, and Beth Fowler, Isabel Keating and Mitchel David Federan turn in such wonderful performances, it's a shame the show won't survive without its leading man. I liked the show fine, but I'd rather have Peter Allen back writing cabaret again.
Taboo: Awful. Awful. Awful. On the night I saw the show, a fist fight broke out for some reason a couple of rows behind me and to the right. I was tempted to turn around and watch it instead of Taboo. It was probably a lot more interesting. Rosie O'Donnell could have offered me $10 million to see the show and I'd have to think about it.
Caroline or Change: Nobody but nobody does white liberal guilt on stage like Tony Kushner. There are bits of this musical that are too ponderous and drawn out, but in between them are some joyous moments of song and sympathy. See this when it transfers to the O'Neill next month, but act quickly. I've a feeling it won't last long outside the protective bubble of the Public Theater, although it deserves — and will get — great play in the regionals.
Homebody/Kabul: On the other hand...well, actually, I liked Act I of this more traditional Kushner nudge-fest a lot. It's an amazing tour de force monologue that I would have welcomed hearing more of in the second and third acts. Amy Morton just played the hell out of it in the Steppenwolf production. By the end of the play, though, I was just tired. Long Day's Journey Into Night tired. The non-ending gave me a lot to think about for a few days and I've always admired Frank Galati's directorial style, but now I'm quite lukewarm about the piece.
The Light in the Piazza: It's not usually good to have the urge to leave immediately while sitting in the theatre but, damn, did I ever want to get up from my seat at The Goodman and catch the next plane for Florence while watching this. From the lush, string-laden overture (and all the wonderful music by Adam Guettel) to the alternately heart-tugging and -rending performance by Victoria Clark to the pure sex of Wayne Wilcox's voice, it was every inch a winner. It's a beautiful paean to finding human connections in utterly foreign places and situations.
Avenue Q: A must-see. Probably the most pure fun I've had in the theatre in the last year. Nude puppets and the hilarious John Tartaglia — what could be better? (The answer, of course, is if the two were reversed.) It's the most hummable, quotable score of the season and contains the most optimistic line: "George Bush is only for now." Let us all pray they have to change the lyrics in a couple of months. It messes with the rhyme scheme, but I like the sound of "George Bush was only for then."
Never Gonna Dance: A friend of mine called this Never Gonna Sell and, it turns out, he was right. I enjoyed it thoroughly, thanks mostly to the lithe and graceful Noah Racey, to the timeless Jerome Kern songs, and to Jeff Hatcher's winking book. Nancy Lemenager, Peter Gerety, Karen Ziemba — the whole cast just looked like they were having great fun putting on a show. It was sure infectious. I happened to see this on the same weekend as the gorgeous Wonderful Town and while I love musicals that love New York, I loved Never Gonna Dance just a smidge more.
Aunt Dan and Lemon: Not to everyone's taste, but probably the best play I saw in New York this year (not forgetting I Am My Own Wife, which is really in a class of its own). Kristen Johnson's performance was sublime. The production had a few stumbles that pointed up how difficult it can be to get Wallace Shawn's plays right, but I enjoyed it all the same.
Side by Side by Sondheim: The Muny just shouldn't do revues, particularly given the unfortunate tendency of local audiences not to "get" Sondheim. Still, if folks were a little lost here, it wasn't entirely their fault. Under-rehearsed and over-miked, it was a train wreck. Dropped or misspoken lyrics might be overlooked in retros of other composers' work, but lose a line from "Getting Married Today" and it's dead.
Show Boat: This, on the other hand, is a show tailor-made for The Muny and unlike most of their retreads, I'm apt to show up any time it's offered. Michel Bell gave his reliable, wonderful performance as Joe and Karen Morrow fared considerably better as Parthenia than she did in the Sondheim tragedy above.
Starlight Express: No, no, a thousand times no. I actually kind of liked this show years ago when I saw the original production in London. On tour these days, particularly in a barn like the Fox Theatre, it's just wretched. A gimmicky 3-D film replaces the once-thrilling rollerskate race scenes and, as a result, the whole production never achieves any momentum at all, much less the massive amount needed to sell the trite songs.
As for stuff that we did...
Metamorphoses: Time to toot the horn for the home team. We opened The Rep season with this show and it simply couldn't have been better. A wonderful cast full of new friends (including Manu Narayan, who's currently on the boards in Broadway's version of Bombay Dreams) and an ethereal pool on stage made it like the dream it was meant to evoke. I saw two productions of this show in New York and, rah-rah for our side notwithstanding, I liked ours better.
The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?: Edward Albee's devastating family drama just blew me away the first time I saw it in New York, then again in The Goodman's stellar production with Barbara Robertson as Stevie. The third time was a charm, though, with Andy Matthews and Carolyn Swift in our Studio Theatre production. Absolutely pitch-perfect and an exemplary performance of Albee's smart, precise language.
The Last Five Years: Tony Holds and Kate Baldwin were the perfect Jamie and Kathy in our final Studio production. Don't get me wrong: I adore Norbert Butz, but Tony really nailed the mix of insecurity and ego, swept up by the confusion and pressure of a meteoric career rise, that the role calls for, such a potentially loveable asshole. And as for Kate, she's going places and they're all good (including Paper Mill's Guys and Dolls this summer). I was so sad to see this cast leave.
Concert Highlights: The big three for me this year were Bette Midler's "Kiss My Brass" (seen in an early incarnation at Savvis Center and which I understand just got better along the tour), Eddie Izzard's "Sexie" and The Eagles' "Farewell I" tour. I didn't get to as many arena shows or other concerts this year as I have in the past, and there's not much on the summer roster that really appeals to me. Ah well.
Who knows? Perhaps in a few weeks, I'll offer my prognostications with regard to the
gay Super Bowl. For the first time in a couple of years, I've actually seen everything likely to get a major nom.
April 19, 2004 at 7:39 PM
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Theatre
Alert the populace
I love New York in
June May. How about you?
A quick trip mid-month to see a couple of friends who've landed big — and deservedly so — on Broadway, and to check in with
Messrs. Czolgosz, Zangara, Byck, Booth et al. I'm still dicing dates and cursing the dearth of reward-eligible flights, but I'd say it's nearly a done deal for the weekend of the 15th.
Further bulletins as events warrant.
April 19, 2004 at 12:51 PM
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Roam
Friday, April 16, 2004
A Conversation From the Bar Scene
The Giant Queen: Are you still seeing that guy you met at The Complex last month?
Jeff: Paul? Yeah, we've gone out a few times.
Brad: Oh really?
Jeff: Well, we've had sex a few times.
The Giant Queen: A
few times? That's serious for you. Is he relationship material?
Jeff: I don't know. He's a nice guy, but he seems like he's got a lot of baggage.
Brad: Please. He works for United Airlines. He'll lose that soon enough.
April 16, 2004 at 4:20 PM
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Conversations
Weekend Cuties
A Trio of Weekend Cuties: The Cute List has also long lain fallow, so it'll be added to my list of summer renovations hereabout. In the meantime, here are a handful of boys wot are making my trousers tighter today.
"Simon": A model for
Squirtz. I'm not typically the type to fawn over porn actors and models, but I can't get this cutie amateur off my brain. Bright smile and a lovely lilting French-Canadian accent combined with an...well,
enthusiasm for his paid-to-wank work. Makes me want to take up snowboarding — his professed favorite sport — and stalk the slopes just searching for him. My, my, my, my, my.
Bobby Cannavale: Formerly of
Third Watch and
Kingpin, he's now the only reason to watch
Will & Grace now that the writing's gone way downhill and the acting's gone way over the top. He plays a cop named Vince, the latest love interest for Will. Vince is dating
way below himself.
Michael Carr: Handsome, sweet and dedicated to customer service. What's not to love? I discovered this fella while watching my favorite reality TV show,
Airline. Michael's a manager for Southwest Airlines at LAX. I was devastated to find out he already has a boyfriend, since I was banking my Rapid Rewards for an exploratory journey to LA.
April 16, 2004 at 3:25 PM
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Cute!
(Web)log-Rolling
(Web)log-Rolling: It's been a while since I did a Bookmark dump here, and even longer since I pruned and updated my poor, neglected
Links directory. As a partial redress, here are a few new, new-to-me or recently rediscovered sites I've been enjoying recently.
April 16, 2004 at 2:34 PM
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Recommended
Friday, April 9, 2004
A Weekend Away
A Weekend Away: I'm off to Chicago again this weekend, to tend to a few matters theatrical and social. Already I'm anticipating brunch with
dear friends and expectant parents, a late-night glass lifting with a newfound
partner in crime and, of course, the citywide celebration sure to attend the annual observance of
a certain Rogers Park celebrity.
And, as ever, there are the ineluctably handsome and accommodating men of the city to consider. Alert the populace. My flight arrives in time for happy hour.
April 9, 2004 at 3:33 AM
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Roam
Monday, April 5, 2004
Come November, let’s retire the side…
The
Cardinals have invited the "president" of the "United States" to
throw out the first pitch at this afternoon's season opener.
What, there weren't enough rich, white guys on the field already?
Apparently the Redbirds are following a trend of "outsourcing" a job that could be more ably handled by Messrs. Ankiel, Isringhausen, Morris or Simontacchi (yum!).
I've decided to call that first baseball
Representative Democracy and the Rights of the American People, since George W. Bush has been throwing those out for quite a while now.
I can barely wait until November when
we can send this team to the showers.
Still, it's a
beautiful day for a ballgame. What say,
Ernie? Let's play two!
April 5, 2004 at 10:47 AM
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General
It’s a raft tonight
The smoke, at once sweet and acrid, curls around my head in the dim light leaking into the room from the door. The house is quiet; there's no sound at all, in fact, except the arrhythmic rattle of a tree branch blown in the wind against the window frame.
Derrick has stopped stirring beside me and sleeps quietly too, in that mysterious, almost deathly way he has. I could put my hand on his chest and feel the beat of his heart, so slow now as to be almost imperceptible. I'm amazed once more at how he can thrash so much before sleep just seems to crash down on top of him and still his body instantly.
I am trying to think how to answer his question, those final few words I could make out as he shivered and convulsed lightly before plummeting into dreams. Derrick talks in his sleep, but only in those few moments of frenzy, and rarely intelligibly. A few selected phrases, gathered in my memory over a period of weeks and months, seem to have some bearing on his waking life, but we never discuss them in the mornings that follow.
It's been over a month since we've shared a bed and tonight's question, delivered hoarsely but with a recognizable rise in pitch at the end, is the continuation of a conversation we had the last time, an uncharacteristic sharing of intimate secrets.
I turn the question over in my mind. "Is it an airplane or a boat tonight, do you think?"
For me, it is almost always a boat, a raft, actually. Tonight, it will be raft again.
It was only the fifth time we'd managed to get together, our work and travel schedules happily lining up to give us a night uninterrupted. The sex was fantastic, athletic even, as it had been from the first, and when we finally collapsed, breathless, into each other's arms, Derrick was giggling, giddy, his face flushed like a little boy who's been tickled until he can't catch his breath.
It did feel a little like a schoolboy sleepover, the way we'd rough-house and wrestle until finally everyone just fell back on their sleeping bags and told ghost stories in the dark. I said as much and Derrick laughed again.
We talked about our boyhood dreams and the things we thought we'd be when we were older, when we became the men we are now. We talked about the make-believe battles we fought in the backyard and the pup tents and Scout troops and I told Derrick about the raft.
"A lot of nights, before I turned out the lights and went to sleep, I'd sit in my bed with pillows propped around me, my legs stretched all the way out and I'd imagine that my bed was a raft on the river," I said. "I'd conjure up the Mississippi or the Missouri all around the edges of the bed and picture a clear, cool, starlit night. I'd listen as hard as I could, particularly in the summer when the windows were up and the breeze carried the sounds of crickets and cicadas and owls into the house.
"And then I'd switch off the lamp and roll onto my side and pull the sheets around me and close my eyes and float away. Just me and my raft and the river, floating away until I fell asleep."
Derrick smiled at this, I remember. "Like Tom and Huck," he said.
"One or the other," I said.
"All alone, out there on the river? It's a big place for a little boy, all by himself."
I still do it, I told him. Even when you -- or someone else -- is here with me, I still try to make the river real, to just float by myself until sleep takes me.
We were quiet for a minute. "That must seem pretty silly," I said. "A grown man fancying himself Huck Finn to go beddy-bye."
"It's not silly," Derrick said, and then he was silent for a minute more.
"I do it too."
I shifted to look at him, gently running my fingers along his forehead. "You do?"
"For me, it's an airplane. Or a spaceship. I'm the pilot -- I see it in my mind, flying -- and all my passengers and crew are below. We soar and I think about the places I want to go, the places a plane can take me or the stars we might explore someday."
That might explain your tossing about, I say. "The passengers must get a thrilling ride, with all those barrel-rolls you do in your sleep."
He laughs again and I can see Derrick, age 8, and Derrick, age 28, guiding his airplane of sheets and covers through the clouds. I wonder if I could fly at night, why I never have. I wonder if I might be able to look up from my raft and see him speeding across the sky as I drift lazily along, taken by the current. "Why don't you try to fly someday?" he asks.
"I just might," I say.
We've worn ourselves out and the day is closer than it should comfortably be. We keep hold of each other and for a while, I let myself be carried along by his restlessness until finally he sleeps and, I presume, is carried aloft in his dreams. And I push back from the shore and give myself up to the river.
And now, all these weeks later, as he takes flight he wants to know. Is it an airplane or a boat?
I don't think I've ever told anyone else about my river excursions; certainly I'd never admitted they're still almost nightly departures, 30 years after the first. And I needn't think very hard, nor do I wish to, about what it means that my nocturnal fantasies take me away to solitude, with a destination left to the whimsy of the water while this clever, coltish man's take him to the skies with dozens in his wake, on a course set by his own imagination.
It's a raft, of course, and the stars are just coming out.
I take one last drag on the joint, stub it out and settle beneath the sheets.
"It's a raft tonight," I whisper. "But I'll try to fly someday."
April 5, 2004 at 2:46 AM
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My So-Called Lifestyle
Saturday, April 3, 2004
Eat the oyster, children…
...I'm also in a fun place right now. I'm learning new things and trying new things and trying to be open about ideas and opportunities and... suchlike. I lived a very long time in the land of assumption. I thought I was this other guy, see, and it turns out I wasn't actually him at all. I made him up! Funny, isn't it?
Now, the hard part is that I sort of tattooed him to me rather than just wearing him like a suit. He's very hard to erase...
Some good advice and another in the ever-growing list of reasons I love
Lance Arthur.
April 3, 2004 at 1:28 PM
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Recommended
Friday, April 2, 2004
Mixed Signals
If you think men send mixed signals in real life, you should join
gay.com, where it's elevated to an art.
April 2, 2004 at 12:00 AM
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General
Thursday, April 1, 2004
I Fool More
Denouement: I like to think that the hallmark of a decent April Fool's Day gag is verisimilitude, providing just enough details and vague context to be plausible and yet remaining more than a bit fantastic and over the top. So, while I'm grateful beyond measure for everyone's good wishes and congratulations, they are, at best, premature.
There's no movie deal and, while I do plan (hopefully this summer) to take a pied-à-terre in Chicago, St. Louis will have to put up with me for a long time to come, I imagine. There is a book of sorts, and there once was a handshake deal with a certain New York publisher but, other than that, all embellishment.
My challenge this year was to come up with a yarn that would draw in the folks who don't actually visit the website (instead using an RSS reader or somesuch) and, if anything, I was
too successful. There were a few clues if you looked for them and read between the lines.
More Fool I said backwards is, of course, "I Fool More" and the particularly observant will note that the entry permalinks on the July 8 pre-saging post and today's note were just one digit apart.
And, of course, as several folks have observed, it's extremely unlikely that I, a gregarious braggart and fellow who can barely keep the smallest bit of good news to himself, could have sat on such a secret for nearly a year. Every one who knows me has a little bit of information all to themselves that can either prove or disprove something in the two entries below. The "laptops" and "meetings" with which I was concerned at South by Southwest, for example, were of an entirely different sort and not really fit for family discussion.
It's April 1, friends, and I encourage you to take everything you read or hear today with a grain or two of NaCl. I've nearly been taken in by two extremely good pranks so far, and I expect more tests of my wits before sundown.
Again, thank you for your notes of congratulations and confidence. I'm sorry for having a little fun at your expense and do hope I haven't disappointed anyone too terribly much. I do very much look forward to the day(s) to come when I can share such good -- or even better -- news with you, my friends.
April 1, 2004 at 1:10 PM
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Brad L. Graham is a writer, editor, riverboat gambler, fashion consultant, softshoe dancer, professional assassin, freelance factotum and singer of sentimental ballads.The BradLands is his home on the web. 
Find Brad elsewhere on the web.