awww...

so sometimes i just never cease to be amazed at these guys…wylie is a good guy. tough, but good. he’s well intentioned, has a lot of attitude, doesn’t take shit off of anyone, and is the kind of guy you really want on your side if you ever got in a bar fight. not exactly your sentimental type… just to give you an idea…so scrappy comes out of one of the dorm areas next to the bay last night while pilcher and i are having one of our “jam sessions” (his phrase, not mine)… and says, “i can always tell when wylie goes to bed early…” um, ok…i'll bite… how’s that? “because he’ll block his door open a couple of inches with a block of wood so he can fall asleep listening to ya’ll.” awww…

don't shoot the messenger...

ducky… is on his way home right now. to a well deserved vacation, home, friends, family, and his suspiciously bisexual girlfriend. let’s start by saying that for having known each other since grade school, they have some serious trust and communication issues to begin with. she thinks he’s cheating on her here (with who?!), he thinks she’s hooking up every time she goes out there. she has a hard time talking to him about some issues, so she’ll call and talk to kase (one of the other dispatchers) and make HIM tell ducky what’s going on. …this is how all this came out in the first place. she couldn’t tell ducky, so she told kase and hung up the phone after asking him to tell ducky. what is this, middle school? how old are we, 12? now, since all the guys have been religiously watching “the L Word”… all he had to say was, “um, hi tim…” for ducky (and everyone else) to get what had been said. btw, there aren’t a whole lot of secrets in a firehouse… but i digress… it gets worse…let me clarify by saying that ducky, in spite of his faults and everything so, so wrong with this relationship… he’s in love with her. enough to push aside his commitment issues… and he potentially has more of those than *i* do. so of course, as the local queer education resource, i get saddled with listening to and sorting out the whole story. it doesn’t look good. red flag 1: she’s slept with more women than men. by far. red flag 2: she’s trying to “stay away from that” or “wean herself off” and red flag 3: she literally referred to ducky as “her rehab”, like he’s going to be her savior. …i think i can feel the collective “uh oh…” from the peanut gallery out there. i’m pretty sure i saw those signs in one of my coming out manuals… under the chapter on “denial”. now, I’ve never so much as talked to her… so shut the hell up, i can’t be blamed for any of this… so i might be misreading something. but the question still stands……how do you tell your friend that his girlfriend bats for the other team?

make it stop, someone, please...

i don’t think anyone likes the idea of just wasting time. everyone out here wants to take something away… and with 45 people in the station right now, there’s plenty to learn. we’ve got someone who used to breakdance, wrestlers, martial artists, boxers, kickboxers, salsa dancers… the list goes on. i spend most of my evenings messing around with a guitar… it’s less risky than breakdancing…pilcher got a guitar sent over, and has me out in the bay with him almost every night playing with him. i told him i’d teach him everything i know… which didn’t take long, cuz it isn’t much. i never had anyone to play with, never took lessons… pretty much just what i could pick up and play by ear is what i know. we’ve gone over how to read tab and some basic scales and chords… how to change his strings… that’s about it. now he just wants to get together and play. or “jam”… as he likes to call it……all in all, it’s great for me… i love playing with someone else, and it definitely stretches my abilities and forces me outside my usual repertoire. it’s been 6 weeks, though, and i love him to death… but we’ve got to expand his selection of music. i am so sick of playing metallica, and poison, and pink floyd, and smashing pumpkins that i can hardly stand it. i feel like a radio station, stuck repeating the same 10 songs. only from 80’s metal bands. plus… he wants to learn to sing while he plays. only, when he’s still trying to get the timing down, *i* end up singing. i dunno, but i’m guessing that i don’t have the voice to be doing smashing pumpkins “disarm”… “…the killer in me is a killer in you…” …it’s got to be something like listening to a group of tipsy sorority girls try to do karaoke to eminem. or when the drag queen decides to do the entire 10 minute version of “proud mary”. while laughable for the first verse, it’s like an SNL skit that drags on too long…