Sometimes, you really just have to come clean and admit your part in the homosexual perverted agenda that’s taking over America.
My homosexual perverted agenda is to find a guy who gets me, who makes me laugh and who can put up with my strange mix of fussy domesticity, slovenly backsliding, bouts of cranky rake-waving, and occasional need for space and privacy.
My agenda is to track down some hapless dude who shares some of my musical taste, but not too much, and who loves TV shows that I can’t stand but which I watch because I like being on the couch with him, and who acknowledges our mutual agreement on things with “I know, right?”
My agenda includes awkward dates, skirmishes over details, endless road trips where we talk about nothing at all, breakfasts of biscuits and gravy at which we profess to wanting to go vegetarian, but still feel like life occasionally warrants a nice slice of properly-cooked scrapple.
My agenda involves maybe a too-long courtship, a small ceremony on the porch of a cabin somewhere, arguments over housekeeping, camping trips when it rains without interruption, doting crankily on nieces and nephews, mutual agreement on the tackiness of large television sets, complaints that I work too much, or that he does, bemused and repetitive quips that pants sizes these days are not accurate, gossiping at family functions, and a hand to hold at a funeral.
My homosexual agenda is to argue for thirty years about which way the toilet paper roll should hang, to eventually agree that the painting in the hallway is hanging too low, to grit our teeth when the extended family describe our marriage as not real, and to grin when the kids of those families roll their eyes at their parents.
My homosexual perverted agenda includes crying during Call The Midwife, a tense agreement to disagree on the comic genius or lack thereof of Bill Murray, as much bicycling as possible, followed by commiseration about joints that maybe don’t work as well as they used to, and horrible times spent at the vet’s office when another faithful companion has reached the end of the line.
My pernicious, evil, anti-American homosexual perverted agenda involves sickness and health, the joint processing of dreadful news, moments of mutual delight seeing the sky rendered as a sunset canvas of purple and gold and blue over the endless parking lot of the grocery store, putting up with lifelong nervous tics, the slight tension in a smile when I’m telling the same story he’s heard for twenty years one more exasperating time, the shock of bad news in a doctor’s office and the precision and depth of love in a bad time.
My wicked, pernicious, evil, anti-American homosexual perverted agenda does not fail even in the end, when it’s just one of us once again, at the inevitable end to all relationships there ever were, looking back in a combination of sorrow, loss, regret, and gratitude when something brings us to the “do us part” part, when we’d still go back to the beginning, even after everything, after all the work that goes into love, and do it all again, even though it’ll end with one of us in an urn and so much sadness.
That’s my agenda, and my plan to bring our mighty nation to its knees with the subversive act of handing a cup of coffee across the breakfast table just like every humdrum day, just like when you sort of wonder if you should change your haircut or eat one fewer egg in the morning. We march ahead, an army bent on the horrendous crime of living and loving and fighting and playing and taking all this amazing, terrifying, impossible beauty of this world in, and no one seems to know about our cunning conversations laying out our plans for world domination.
“Dude, what is going on with your toenails?”
“What?”
“There’s a nail trimmer fifteen feet away from you. I feel like I’m being clawed by rampaging golden eagles lately.”
“Sheesh. You are unfailingly overdramatic. Besides, I’m going to need talons for our plot for world domination.”
“Undoubtedly.”
And my agenda continues unabated, a charge against the forces of human decency, because, after all, aren’t people like me really different than people like you in every conceivable way? I mean, just consider all these crazy scenarios I’ve just listed here, and how unlike your life they are. The whole country should be shaking in its boots, right?
© 2016 Joe Belknap Wall