Take some pride

Getting Schooled

I was walking downstairs a few minutes ago and I noticed in the dining room, under the table, the dark, angry eyes of my lesbian attorney, an Australian Shepard named Beth. She recently came out to me, as part of some sort of national Price celebration and things have really gone way down hill fast since then, thus the angry stare as I walk thru the dining room on my way to pick up a fresh cup of coffee.

Feeling this uncomfortable in my own house has made me start to think crazy things, not psycho crazy things like chewing her face off, but crazy things like moving my coffee pot up to my office to avoid eye contact with my Jewish lesbian Australian attorney. I had made it to the kitchen and poured the remains of my cup into the sink, added a brisk little bit of half and half and someone began slamming their fist against my front door.

Now, I live in the ghetto and when people slam their fist against your front door it is generally one of two things, either the police about to bust in with a warrant, for a crime I am damn sure about to plead innocent of, or a criminal about to beat me upside the head, shoot my lesbian Australian Jewish attorney (again!) and make off with my illegal counterfeit Brittany Spears classic CD collectors edition t-shirt business. Instead, it was an angry butch lesbian (ABL).

How do I know she was an angry butch lesbian (ABL)? “Hey, you the guy who writes that blog about life in some ghetto?”

“Yeah, kind of. Yeah.” I said, not yet pouring my second cup of coffee and wondering why my own angry Jewish lesbian was still laying down under the god damned dining room table. Oh right, her own ass is much more fascinating than this angry lesbian standing right at the front door.

“This ain’t no ghetto and there is a big fuckin’ difference between gay and lesbian.”

I was about to be schooled, but not on one cup of coffee. I started with, “if you’ll excuse me for a second, I just need to put some coffee in my cup, could you wait right here?” She was already a couple of steps in my house and on a knee, petting Beth. Lesbians, I said to myself, as I turned and walked into the kitchen.

What I learned from the Angry Butch Lesbian(ABL), who by the way demanded that I refer to her as the Angry Butch Lesbian if I was going to refer to her at all. ABL was nice enough to explain to me that you can be gay and be both a man or a woman, and you can be a lesbian and be gay, but you can’t be a man and be a lesbian, except I pointed out, “Ellen DeGeneres.” She looked at me when I said that like she might kick me in the Lohan’s, so I smiled like I was funny and she said, “So this ain’t no ghetto,” ABL proclaimed, “I grew up in a ghetto, this is, like, paradise compared.”

“Yeah, I grew up in surburbia, this is the ghetto.”

I guess, in life, it is all a matter of perspective. For ABL a ghetto is much worse than having a woman who screams almost night and day at a 2 year old “shut the fuck up you stupid son of a bitch” and for me, that is a sure sign you live in a ghetto.

“Another thing,” ABL started, “you should quit referring to all lesbians as lesbians.”

“What?” I asked, as if the Angry Butch Lesbian had just said the stupidest thing in the world.

“Some of us don’t really like the term lesbian, it’s too scientific. Me? I’m a dyke.”

“So you would rather be called a dyke rather than a lesbian?”

“I’d just as soon a fat middle aged bozo not refer to me at all.”

“Yeah, wait right there. I am far from a fat middle aged bozo. First, the Union of Bozo Americans get pissy whenever I mention bozo’s, because apparently, I am nothing close to being a bozo, I don’t measure up, if you can believe that. Second, I have lost 40 pounds in just the last year.”

“Seriously?”

“No, what you think I was, some sort of hippo?”

“Still, you all sorts of fat.”

“So some rad dyke shows up at my house to tell me not to bag on lesbians, do I have that right?”

“And quit calling your neighborhood a ghetto.”

“Can I finish my coffee now?”

“Yeah, long as we clear.”

“We clear.”

The angry butch lesbian (dyke) left soon after petting my own angry butch lesbian Australian attorney before leaving. My coffee cold and my attitude changed from happy to bereft, because I was pretty sure that I indeed inhabited not only a ghetto, but a ghetto I shared with a militant Jewish lesbian Australian who had returned to the confines of the underside of my dining room table shade, only to consume herself with parts of her body that were both foreign to me and disgusting to me all at the same time.