!!!

*gasp*

Holy Shi'ite Muslim!

Dan Savage commented on my prior post wherein I addressed him!

Totally. Blown. Away.

I happened to be on the phone with the Baron when I arrived back home after work at Ho(t)me(n) Depot tonight (you shoulda seen the guy that was looking for someone to thread some pipe for him), checked my email, and there amongst the spam was an email notifying me that Dan Savage had left a comment to my weblog.

No. Way.

The Baron's response was something along the lines of, "Well, duh!"

When I explained to the Baron that Dan Savage was... like... somebody and I'm not, the Baron got a mite ("mite" or "might"?) testy. "And that would make you nobody? You are not nobody."

Well, no.

Not entirely.

Okay. Maybe.

This is due largely to the fact that I think of the readership of SingleTails as being mostly consisting of people that I know, people who stumbled upon it at some point and tune in now and then to keep up, and people who follow the link I cleverly place in my Recon profile. And nobody else.

But Dan Savage is not only someone who I don't know, and not someone who keeps up, and probably not someone who followed the link from my Recon profile.

Dan Savage is someone Out There In The World. And, more importantly, someone whom I've read and enjoyed lo these many years.

In other words, Dan Savage is somebody.

Oh Dan Savage! Why did you have to send me into a tailspin like this?

I can honestly say that when I wrote about Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan in that recent post, I never imagined that either of them would actually be reading it. Surely I'm far below the radar of luminaries of that caliber. As usual, I was just writing yet another personal essay, doing my best to put into words something that gave me pause and what I was thinking about as a result. Just like my literary hero, Joan Didion. (If I ever found out that Joan Didion read anything I wrote I think I'd put all my fingers into a meat grinder to ensure that would never happen again.)

But c'mon! I'm just this guy who lives in the Howling Wilderness of Southeastern Pennsylvania with my dog and my dad and works at Ho(t)me(n) Depot and writes this goofy little weblog and you're Dan Savage! That's not fair!

Okay.

Okay.

Deep breath.

Okay.

At any rate, it seems evident that I owe Dan Savage an apology. To be sure, I can't figure out how I got it into my head that Dan was not just un-kinky but kink averse to some degree, but apparently, that's not at all the case. It possibly had something to do with over-sensitivity on my part. Back when I was reading Savage Love religiously, I was a newly minted member of GMSMA, as in Gay Male SM Activists, and if you can't be a strident, humorless, hair-trigger defender of the cause, what's the fun of being an activist? And I've mellowed and grown up some since then, and I have to say that there are some aspects of SM that hit me as kind of freaky and byzantine (suspension from fish line strung through syringes poked through the flesh of the torso and thighs? really? that works for you?). Too, there's the whole thing that Dan Savage has a kid, and children make me shudder. And this Brave New World that we're entering that has such creatures in it where gay men are getting married and having kids and moving out to the suburbs and voting Republican makes me certain that one dark night there'll come a knock at my door and I'll be carted off to the Re-Education Camp with my fellow neanderthals.

So yeah. I was too quick to judge and apparently my hasty judgment was flat out wrong and I'm sorry.

And I'm also sorry about getting so dramatic here. I don't deal well with interactions with people I admire. When I first was in a room with david stein it took will power I didn't know I had not to bolt for the door. Then a few years later there I was flogging him. If you manage to get a few drinks in me, I'll tell you about how I once had dinner with Derek Jarman when I was in London and how Not Well that went. If perchance Dan Savage ever reads this--and I pray that's not the case--I can only hope he takes it as a compliment and reads my apology as sincere.

Okay.

Now then. I hope I can get back to writing about my dog and softball and whipping men until they bleed and my quest for the perfect meatloaf and scalloped potatoes and Ho(t)me(n) Depot and such without having to face the trauma of men who blaze across the firmament of my imagination like comets such as Dan Savage sending me into a tizz by posting comments to my weblog again.

So the pipe threader guy?

Amazing. Big blue eyes. Billy-goat beard down to his belly-button. Sleeve tattoos. An ass you could stand three beer mugs on. Images of him chained up in a cellar next to a bucket he uses as a toilet subsisting on the table scraps I feed him in a dog bowl danced in my head as I locked eyes with him and called into my walkie-talkie asking, "Is there a plumbing associate available to assist a customer at the pipe threader?"