THE ETERNAL HEAD SCRATCHER

-->There’s so much about the world we live in that I don’t get.

·      The Kardashians (At least my old version of Word underlines the word with a red squiggly line.)

·      Matt Lauer

·      Golf (Unless it includes little windmills.)

·      Tom Cruise (Not once. Not even when he danced around to a Seger song I sorta liked.)

·      The American president

·      Playoff beards (If you grow it, groom it.)

·      The Second Amendment (Right to bear arms? Really? Who talks like that? Isn’t that evidence enough that it doesn’t fit our times? If we keep the phrase, it should be jiggered to the “right to bare arms” because that is something I think is worthy of debate. I wore a tank to the gym last week and I’m pretty sure it was very, very wrong.)

·      Any incarnation of “Law and Order”

·      Treating travel like a selfie scavenger hunt (See Eiffel Tower. Get your selfie. Dash to the Champs-Élysées. Get your selfie. Repeat, post, repeat.)

·      All things Pokemon

·      The “Full House” revival (Yeah, I watched it way back when, but it’s no “Brady Bunch”.)

·      Britney (Sorry. She doesn’t sing!)

·      Auto-tune (See above.)

·      Zombies and shows with zombies (Makeup could be put to better use.)

·      New Year’s Eve (Getting drunk to watch a clock tick and mumble-sing the lyrics to a song less than 1% of the population knows? I’d campaign to make Groundhog Day a bigger deal.)

·      All these cooking shows where contestants compete (More clock watching and we never get to taste any of it.)

·      The endless making of superhero movies (I like my Ryan Reynolds out of costume.)

·      The urgency people feel in acquiring the latest iPhone (and why that “i” is lower case)

·      Dr. Who and why they keep changing the lead actor (Sorry.)

           

I could go on.

If I were living in an age of the guillotine, a mob of angry villagers would track me down, chant, “Off with his head!” and that would be that. (I am very grateful guillotines are a thing of the past. Let’s not make them retro, okay?) Of course, there’s still that pesky Second Amendment…

For the longest time, I didn’t get Twitter either. But a colleague of mine—rather, a retired colleague (albeit from Tech Services)—told me it was all the rage and I absolutely had to get on it. So I did. My Twitter page informs me that I’ve been tweeting since July 2009. Eight years of hooey. I’ve got time for it, I suppose. It’s not like I’m the American president.

I’m not as clueless about Twitter as I used to be. It served its purpose on lonely Saturday nights when I lived in a rural nowhere-land and someone would “Like” my tweet linking to an Olivia Newton-John song. (No auto-tuning.) I was glued to Twitter as news came out about the horrid happenings at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. And I’ve been heartened to see regular pics of seemingly happy gay couples of all ages, shapes and sizes.

Over the course of my Twitter existence, I’ve noticed changes in how gay men identify themselves. Early on, there were a lot of eggs and vague monikers like “PeoriaGayGuy” and “TheGayGardener”. Heck, that’s how I opened my account: “RuralGay”. I didn’t go with the conventional egg. (It made me look fat in the middle.) I don’t even remember, but I must have gone with a rural picture or some badly cropped headshot.

I haven’t seen an egg on Twitter in ages. A good thing.

For a while though, I was concerned that some of the younger tweeps seemed to reject gay. A lot of “bromos” opened accounts. Never really got it. I’m gay, but not like that? Through my old eyes, the term seemed to separate rather than unite. The bromo fad appears to have waned.

All this brings me to the latest thing I don’t get on Twitter. Rather than hiding behind an egg or adopting a new term, I’ve noticed a lot of Twitter bio blurbs where the men identify themselves as “gay AF”. In the ‘90s, that would be daring. Screw you, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I’m a proud gay member of the Air Force.

Okay, even I knew that couldn’t be it. But I knew we’re in that sort of “screw you” world these days. (We have world leaders exchanging barbs about being “old” and “fat”, after all.) So this new trend is to self-identify as “gay as fuck”, aka gay AF.

Hmm. Suddenly Dana Carvey’s Church Lady is in my head: “Well, isn’t that special?!” It is great that these guys aren’t hiding in a closet or behind vague names and blurry pics. Kudos. How far we have come, indeed. I guess I just don’t know why we need to make the “AF” a thing. Be loud. Be proud! More than that, be involved. Be open to accepting the wide range of people for whom the rainbow flag flies.

But gay AF? I shrug at best. I don’t get it. Add it to my list.