swimming with jonathan

So, I never saw Jonathan after the camping trip, and maybe it’s my fault, since I never texted him. I saw on Facebook that he’s already gone to school anyway.

It’s not like I expected anything to happen. I’m pretty sure Jonathan is completely straight after all. Yeah, we did hang out just the two of us this summer a few times, but I never got any real signals that he liked me as anything more than just a friend.

It was nice hanging out together though.

Still, I wonder. Jonathan hasn’t had a girlfriend since middle school, not that I know of anyway.

And then there was this time at the pool a few weeks back that I haven’t talked about. We were laying out in the sun, and Jonathan asked me what I thought about these two girls who were also laying out on deck chairs, a few yards down and in front of us. I said the one on the right was hot. He agreed with me. We sat there a few more minutes, and I pointed out another girl, and he also approved. This girl was wading in the shallow end with a really tan guy in sunglasses, who had a nice muscular back. For like .0001 seconds I thought about asking him “And what about the dude?” but of course I didn’t.

Instead I pointed out this saggy breasted fat old lady and said I’d take her over all the other girls and he said “How did I not notice her before? Hot momma.” And we laughed and I put on my sunglasses so I could follow this swimmer wearing a speedo with my eyes without Jonathan noticing. Then Jonathan asked me if I would rub sunscreen on his back, so I did. Very thoroughly. I even put my fingers down the waistband at the back, grazing the top of his ass. I got a semi doing that.

We kept people-watching and relaxing. Then we swam some laps and when we were taking a break I told him we should talk to those two sunbathing girls. He said no, like he was too shy. In my opinion, Jonathan has no reason to be shy.

I told him I caught the one in red watching us while we were swimming. He said “Yeah?” like he didn’t believe it but was intrigued. I told him to man up and make a move. He said “A few more laps and then we can go over there.”

Of course, by the time we swam a few more laps, the girls were gone. “You missed your chance.” And he just shrugged and gave a sheepish smile.

Before we were ready to go, we went to the lockers to change. I told him I’d take a shower and on an impulse I pulled down my shorts so I was standing naked. If I hadn’t done it on an impulse I think I would’ve gotten hard, just thinking about doing it. But I was in the moment, and it was okay. Maybe it even looked a little smaller because of the swimming. I maybe should’ve thought about that. Oh well.

Anyway, he definitely looked. Like I saw his eyes trail down and back up. But he said pretty quickly, “Okay, see you in a few,” and he picked up his stuff and went into one of the stalls. So I went and took a shower, alone, and by the time I left the showers Jonathan had already left the locker room, without saying anything to me.

I don’t know what you guys think, but the whole situation seemed a little off to me. Jonathan was on the soccer team, so I would think that he’s used to seeing guys showering in the locker room. He seemed uncomfortable and eager to get away. But maybe I’m reading into these small things too much. Maybe Jonathan is just shy.

Well, not that any of this really matters. Now this is all history.

This will be my last post before I go to college. I leave early tomorrow morning. I’m probably going to be a lot busier from now on, but hopefully I’ll keep up the blog. I’ve gotten faster at typing these things up. So I will do my best to drop in when I get the time. Until then… signing off.

packing

packing

Packing now. Mom’s helping, sort of. She bought me a plant today, and a jumbo set of toilet paper. I told her, “I think they have stores there too Mom. And if I walk into the dorm with that much toilet paper my roommate’s gonna think I have bowel issues or something.” (Or that I’m a freak masturbator… which actually isn’t too far off from the truth).

“You’ll thank me later. Trust me,” she says. I really don’t want to know what my mom thinks I’ll need all that toilet paper for.

Then she asks me stuff like what color my roommate’s bed covers are. She’s asked me about this more than once. No joke. “How am I supposed to know?” I say.

“Haven’t you talked to him? I told you to ask him!”

Do you want him to think I’m gay? Do you want him to think I’m going to try to color-coordinate his pillow cases with the rainbow flag I’ll hang up on the wall? I think about saying something like this, but I don’t. Instead I say, “There are way more important things to talk about.”

“THIS is important!” she says.

There’s already more stuff than will be able to fit in my car, so we’re going to have to take two. My brother has school and my dad says he needs to work, so my mom will drive with me, in the other car. It’s a long drive. About ten hours. But my mom will stay with relatives up there for a couple days before she comes back home.

The trip is going to be long and boring, but I don’t mind it that my mom and I are in separate cars. My mom can talk a lot, and if we ride together I would probably hear a lot more about those blankets.

college advice

Last night my grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins (all on my dad’s side) came over for dinner. They asked me the typical questions that people ask you about college, the ones I’ve been answering since my graduation party and that I have canned responses to. By this point though, they mostly have a lot of advice. The funny thing is when one piece of advice contradicts another one. Like when my grandpa said that the most valuable thing he learned in college was how to hold his liquor. My mom disapproved, just shook her head and gave me a look. (Mom lives in a world where I go to parties and drink coke and juice). Grandpa looked at me over the table and said, “Learn how to hold your liquor, son.” He pointed his fork at me like Uncle Sam does in that painting.

My uncle followed my brother, my cousin and me outside and watched us play ball in the driveway while the sun was setting. When we finished, he slapped me on the shoulder. “Here, have a drink. I won’t tell your mom.” And he handed me his big glass of bourbon and coke. Tasted more like bourbon than coke. Then he said “Didn’t want to say it at the dinner table, but you need to know this: never trust a girl who says she’s on the pill. It would be a good idea to carry a condom or two, wherever you go. And ALWAYS wear thongs in the showers. Always. Take it from me.”

I’m guessing by thongs he meant flip flops. Anyway, once you hit college age, I guess it means that all of a sudden your relatives think they can give you sex advice without it being super awkward anymore.

Then Jeff, my cousin, said “Dad’s right. You should do that. His feet are gross.”

I know this post is like, the opposite of sexy, but I’m attaching a picture of a hot guy anyway. To make up for it, I guess.

anticipation

I’m leaving in four days, and there are things to do, shit to buy, shit to pack.

My facebook friend count just skyrocketed with a lot of people from college I haven’t even met yet. Mostly girls though. The guys don’t usually add you, and I’m not about to go around adding guys just because they look hot.

I’ve actually chatted some with my roommate, and he seems pretty cool so far, but who knows until we meet.

In less than a week, I’ll be in college, living in a new city, around all new people. I’ll have a totally new life. Crazy!

Mostly over Elizabeth now, I knew the break up was coming anyway. She called me yesterday to ask me how I was doing, and the conversation was pretty normal otherwise. I don’t know if we’ll see each other again before we leave. Probably not. It might seem awkward if we do.

Change is coming, and fast. There’s not really even time to think about it. I guess I should be excited right now. But right now I don’t even know what to feel, so I think I just feel nothing. I’m just giving myself up to the changes.

dumped

Went to the movies with Elizabeth last night. Saw The Spectacular Now. After the movie, I drove her home, and then we were sitting in the car and I could tell she was gearing up to say something.

Travis, she said.

Oh fuck, I thought.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You know we’re both going away soon, and I was thinking,”

“Yeah me too.”

“You were? I was thinking that it’ll be hard to stay together when we’re so far apart,”

“Yeah, I agree. Totally. I think we should focus on meeting new people.”

She looked at me a second then she smiled a little bit, like a pity smile. Then she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek and we gave each other an awkward half hug. “I’m glad we both feel the same way.”

“Me too! I was worrying about that.”

She laughed and said “Aw really?”

“Yeah, I didn’t know if you’d feel the same way, but you do, so that’s great.” It was all over, that quick. The whole time I was smiling, and she kept looking at me and it made me feel awkward so I looked ahead out the window. Just then this big old possum waddled across the street under the light of a streetlight. “Hey, look at that ugly thing!” I pointed to it, and it turned its head toward us like it heard me and its eyes glowed bright white and then it ran into the dark and disappeared.

“Disgusting,” Elizabeth said.

We attempted some more small talk, and then said goodnight. Elizabeth said we should try to see each other again before we leave and I said sure. The whole time she wore that same smile and I wore some goofy grin. After she left the car my mouth hurt from all that smiling.

So, if this is how the conversation went, why do I feel like I was just dumped?

I’ve never been dumped before.

And if I didn’t love Elizabeth, why do I feel so empty right now?

the end of something

Kelly’s leaving tomorrow. I called him, he didn’t answer. Then later on, he called me back. He said he was busy and couldn’t hang out, which is fine. I didn’t really expect him to anyway.

I asked him if things were better between him and his mom now, kind of awkwardly, because I asked him the same question, before, on Facebook, but he didn’t give me a real answer. He said yeah, things were pretty much back to normal. Fine, good… but I wondered if maybe he was just telling me that so I’d stop prying. I never got the story about the fight anyway, since we hadn’t been able to talk one-on-one when we were camping.

We talked some about getting ready for college and I said I couldn’t believe it was already here. I also mentioned how it would be a while before we saw each other again, and he laughed. “You’re talking like it’s the end of the world! We’ll still see each other on breaks.”

I laughed too. And told him “yeah, if you can survive living in the middle of a fucking cornfield.”

He said he would get by. We didn’t talk at all about Linda, I realized after I hung up the phone.

Yeah, it’s not the end of the world. But it’s the end of SOMETHING.

Like I said, Kelly and I have been best friends all through high school. We met when we were trying out for the football team as freshmen. When you get along with someone, like, when you have a connection on some deeper level, you just know, and somehow we knew, and during practices we were at each other’s side whenever we could be, and pretty soon we were hanging around each other all the time even outside practice.

By this point I feel like I know pretty much everything about Kelly. When he had hemorrhoids and jock itch, I knew about it. When he hooked up with a girl, I knew about it. I also told him when I did, but I embellished a little bit, and kind of left out the fact that I’d never actually gone all the way. When he had problems with his dad, he told me about them, and when something was going on between me and my parents, I told him. He told me about the things that got him excited and the things that made him angry.

But toward graduation and this summer things have been weird, like I’ve said a million times already. I’m starting to sound like a broken record, sorry guys.

Anyway, I guess people don’t stay “best friends forever.” So why should I be worried about the way things are going right now? It’s natural. Come on Travis this is the real world.

having kids?

No, I’d rather have a dog. Or this guy. Yeah, I’d take him.

One of the things that’s bothered me for a long time about being gay is knowing that chances are, I won’t have a normal family. I won’t have a normal life. I won’t fall in love with a girl, I won’t have kids, I won’t watch them grow up and see myself in the face of the boy, or the face of the girl. Their faces would be the mixture of mine and the face of the girl I chose to make babies with. They’d be like, symbols. Of me, of her, of love, of the Circle of Life… some sentimental shit like that.

That’s the way I used to think of it, but now I don’t know. All that stuff still SOUNDS good, but after thinking about it for a long time, I decided that it’s not such a bad thing not having kids after all.

First of all: kids can be cute sometimes, but most of the time, they’re a pain in the ass. Even the nice ones. Trust me, I work with kids, I know what I’m talking about.

The problem is you can’t choose what kind of kid yours is going to turn out to be. Some of the kids at the tennis camp are little assholes. Don’t tell me they’re just kids, who don’t know any better, young and sweet and innocent, there really are kids that the world would be a lot better off without. The ones who do nothing but try to make things hard on everybody else, bully and pick on other kids, torture small animals, etc. etc. You can try to make them behave, but you know that the minute they think you’re not paying attention anymore they’re going to go right back to doing what you told them not to do, or decide to try out something even worse, like rubbing dirt in that girl’s face because she looks too happy.

What if your kid turned out to be one of those assholes? Then you’d have to deal with some asshole your whole life, and you would be forced to be NICE to him, but even if you did your best, it probably wouldn’t matter because in the end, he’d only want your money anyway and would probably stuff you in some retirement home until you kicked it.

SECOND thing: all that stuff I talked about up there sounds really noble and great, but when it comes down to it having a kid is a pretty selfish thing to do. People want to have kids to “raise them well,” teach them well, spoil them with nice stuff, carry on the family genes and the family name. But why should I need to have little Travis-copies running around all over the place, other than to boost my own ego? That’s what it’s all about, ego. I don’t need to teach a kid who looks like me to be like me… there’s already one me, and it already has enough problems without passing them on to another person.

And also, why bring another kid into this world? It’s not headed in a very good direction right now. You might say that we’re all fucked. We’re using up all the world’s resources because we want plasma screens and air conditioning and burgers and kids. So why fuck over another human being? Just so you can set him down in front of some plasma screen, let him grow up while having a copy of your genes, and hope that this copy of your genes doesn’t turn out messed up and confused about everything like you are?

All this sounds cynical as hell… maybe I’m just trying too hard to convince myself it’s not what I want. But it isn’t. I think.

gay encounter at the beach

Since I haven’t been working the past week or so I have some free time on my hands.

So I guess I’ll type up the story of what might be the gayest thing that’s ever happened to me. It’s sort of embarrassing for me to write about, and I’ve never told about this to anybody. But I told myself I would hold nothing back on this blog, so here it is.

When I was like 13 or 14, I was on vacation with my family at a beach in North Carolina. There were a lot of surfers on this beach. They were everywhere. So needless to say, it was a pretty entertaining weekend for me. When I got tired of listening to my mom talk about real estate values or Bible values or how there are no values in the Modern Media, I could just block her out and rest my eyes on the blue gray ocean, and watch the surfer guys get up on it, fall down, pick up their boards, swim back out, over and over. Some of them wore those tight wet suits, some of them just shorts. I liked watching all of them.

I wanted to do more than watch them, I wanted to be one of them. I wanted to play with them. Out there in the waves, surfing, and maybe in other ways. I was just figuring out back then that I was gay.

At the back of the beach, near the entrance, there was a little building that had changing rooms and bathrooms. On the second day of our vacation, I was building a sand castle with my brother when I saw one of the surfer guys I’d had my eye on in the morning heading toward the changing room. I kept working on the sand castle while watching him out of the corner of my eye. When I saw he went into the changing room, I waited about ten seconds (you know, not to be too obvious), then told my brother to guard the castle, I’d be right back.

The changing room was dark and humid. The men’s side had a few toilet stalls, a couple urinals, and a shower room at the back. It was a gang shower, there weren’t any cubicles. The surfer guy was in the shower, shampooing his hair, still wearing his board shorts. I went automatically to one of the urinals. I didn’t really need to piss, but I had a good view from there. I could watch him from the corner of my eye. He looked just as good up close. He wore yellow shorts, and he had a muscular, tanned upper body. His hair reached down to his shoulders, and it was blond and curly.

I finished pissing quickly, I could only manage a trickle. First of all I didn’t really have to pee, second of all I was getting hard. So I tucked in and then did something kind of bold, for me anyway. Without thinking about it much, I got under another one of the shower heads and started rinsing off too. I didn’t have any shampoo, or any real reason to be in the shower, so I was just standing under the water, pretending to be getting clean. Meanwhile I was trying to check out the guy, but I could never bring my eyes up to look at him directly.

Another guy came in to use the urinal, then left. I’m not sure how long I’d been in there, but it felt like a really long time. Anyway, I knew it was TOO long. But I stayed. The surfer guy had finished washing his hair a while ago.

Since I’d already rinsed off every part of my body by this point, hair, arms, legs, feet, I was running out of reasons to stay in the shower. So I undid my board shorts just enough to let water in, and rinsed off the parts underneath. And I let them slip down some too, so my pubes and the top of my dick were showing. And I know this might sound weird, but I wanted him to see.

He just kept rinsing off, and still I didn’t look at him and I don’t think he looked at me. I turned around toward the wall pretending to wash off my front side better, and when I did I let the shorts slip down a little more in the back. So like half my ass was showing.

When I turned around again, I saw that the surfer guy was completely naked. He was holding his yellow shorts in his hand. But not only that. With his other hand he was stroking his cock, which was hard, and now I knew he was definitely looking at me.

I’d been pretty hard for a while too, and the only thing that was keeping it from sticking straight up in the air was the fact that the head was still trapped underneath the waist band, making it point straight downward. But I’m pretty sure it was obvious that I was hard by this point.

Anyway, when I saw him stroking himself I freaked out. I started to pull my shorts back up, and at just about the same time, another guy came into the changing rooms and went into one of the stalls. But by that point I was already heading straight for the door without even looking back at the surfer guy. I made sure everything was adjusted right and then stepped back out into the sun. I felt ashamed and guilty. Not so horny anymore.

I ran across the sand and when I got back to my brother he asked me what took me so long, and I told him I had to pee. I was distracted though, I wanted to see the surfer leave the changing room.

“Why didn’t you just go in the ocean?”

Just then I saw the surfer guy leave the changing room, he walked away quickly, with a towel around his waist, and then he was gone.

“Go in the ocean? Ew! That’s gross and dirty.”

He shrugged and said “Fish do it…”

I didn’t say anything, and it was hard for me to talk to my family for a while after, that afternoon. I felt dirty. I couldn’t stop thinking about the surfer. And later, after a while, I started to think about what would’ve happened if I’d stayed there. If we’d gone together into one of the toilet stalls. If I had touched him, and he’d touched me. I got so horny thinking about it, but the thought of it still scared me.

We stayed two more days on the beach, and both days, when I watched the surfers, I looked for that one. But I didn’t see him again.

writing

You have no idea how much penis I had to wade through on the internet to find this one picture of a guy holding a pen. It was hard. Really HARD. So thank me, guys.

So maybe now that a few people are reading this blog (big thank you to the people who are, by the way), it’s rude to be writing stuff like this that doesn’t really matter to anybody. Is this stuff boring you guys?

Since I started posting on here, I think I’ve written more than I ever have in my life. The weird thing is that even though I’m writing what seems to me like shitloads, there are always about 10 million more things that I can think of to say.

Like this camping trip. I wanted to write about it so that even you guys, who weren’t there, could understand what happened and could see what happened in your head. But I think I did a pretty shitty job. At least not as good of a job as I wanted. Maybe it’s not even possible to do what I wanted to do, unless you’re a really good writer. I’m not that great of a writer. I never got such good grades in English.

Still, like some of you have said, the writing is starting to help me think about all the stuff that’s happening somehow. Don’t really know how. I don’t think it’s solving any problems, but at least it’s helping me to think about them.

Kelly has Linda, and I’m jealous. But not because I want Linda. It’s because Kelly has what I can’t have. And he doesn’t need me anymore.

camping

We camped in a gorge. At the bottom of the gorge, like fifty, maybe a hundred feet down, there’s this little brown river. You usually can’t see the river because of the trees. Sometimes the drop off is rocky and steep, and you can look over the treetops and see the cliff on the other side of the gorge.

Now I could tell you a shitload of details abut the camping trip, like how long it took to carry all the boxes of beer that Stan’s brother bought for us over this narrow steep trail to our campsite, along with all our other stuff, or how it was hard as fuck to set up Kelly’s old tent, or how Jonathan and I got obsessed with making the biggest campfire ever and collected a mountain of sticks, or how Kelly rolled a big joint and passed it around and I caved and took some puffs this time because I didn’t want to be the only one not doing it, or how I forgot to pack my pillow, or how Stan forgot to pack basically everything.

I could tell you more of that shit, but none of it’s really important. So I won’t waste your time with all that and I won’t waste my time writing it down.

The important thing is that Kelly sat in the light of the campfire with Linda and he would run his hands up and down the inside of her thigh, and that Linda looked pretty and clean, even when she was sweaty and her hair was messy, and that she never took her eyes off Kelly when he played his guitar, and that Jonathan looked nice too in the light of the fire, and that it was nice to look at him especially when he put his head back to laugh about something, and that it made me want to make him laugh….. and for a minute I wished I was Stan with his jokes. For a minute. Less than that.

But maybe even that stuff isn’t important. The real important thing is that all of them were sitting on one side of the gorge, and I was on the other side, far away from them. They sat in the light of the fire, but I was in the dark, and in between us there was the gorge, which was like a big endless black pit, and even if I wanted to get any closer to them I wouldn’t be able to, because if I tried I would fall in. Maybe they wouldn’t have heard me if I called out to them, even.

Kelly and Linda were in their tent fucking. They had a lantern on and even though it was dim you could see their blurry shadows because the fire light was dying down. Jonathan and I had worked so hard with keeping it up, but it still died down. I didn’t know what time it was, but it felt late, and I was getting tired of Stan always trying to hog the attention, and making jokes about Kelly and Linda. I was getting really sleepy, and didn’t even try to stay in the conversation anymore. Stan went into the dark to piss, and then it was me and Jonathan alone at the fire, saying nothing, listening to the sounds of the bugs. The shapes of Kelly and Linda were still moving. Was he relieved when Stan came back and started talking again? Did he feel weird being alone around me? Am I imagining things?

Jonathan Stan and I slept in the other tent. Stan in the middle. I started hating Stan. And then I laughed at myself for it. I’m a loser. What did I expect? A romantic couples weekend with Jonathan and me on one side, Linda and Kelly on the other? Did I really expect that?

No. I was alone, on my side of the gorge.

I couldn’t fall asleep so I walked outside and added some more sticks to the fire, and then watched it die down again.