Big Guns
“It’s too fuckin’ cold to go to school.”
That’s the opening line of Big Guns, the 1987 gay adult film I have on in the background as I write. I would agree, but I don’t go to school anymore, and this is Texas, and it’s May. Though, at 72°, it is colder than usual tonight.
“It’s too fuckin’ cold to go to school; but it’s never too cold to jack off.”
And isn’t that the way, really? The outside world may change, but the mundane remains, unchanged and unchangeable. Your hexis comes to be your own, day in, day out. And damn if porn while writing isn’t a metaphor anyway, lately. Fuck me.
Fuck. Me.
Yeah, so, I’ve been having a hard time. LIke, I feel like life has just done a number on me. I haven’t been writing, I haven’t been exercising, I haven’t been eating normally, I have been sleeping (which is odd for me), and so on and so forth. It’s probably the depression.
(Oh! It’s a series of vignettes! It’s not a single connected storyline. This changes everything. The soundtrack, though, is pretty damn amazing. I’ll have to sample some of it. And now we’re at the scene with the titular guns. Chekov would be proud.)
I mean, sure, it’s the depression, but I don’t know if knowing that it’s the depression is suppose to make me feel better. (He’s getting felt up while firing live rounds. Oh, god, that kiss looks like two slugs sumo wrestling. It’s kinda hot, tbh. Not sure firing live rounds while getting an over-the-pants is a good idea, though. Anyway…) So, I’m depressed. I probably can legitimately blame all my woes of the last year—18 months? 2 years?—on that. Depressed people have a hard time functioning like they want to. (okay. I’m going to have to rewatch this scene later. There’s a lot going on with these, ahem, big guns. Like, damn girl. You could hurt yourself.) But honestly, who cares? The electricity bill doesn’t care if I have ‘the depression’ or not, it still has to get paid. Who ate that entire bag of queso caliente potato chips? The depression? Doesn’t matter— I’m the one who’s several stone overweight now. (There is some Alien-chestburster-level stuff going on between these two white boys with very apparent tan lines.) So, yeah, depression. (Except, like, the alien keeps bursting out, and then going back in, and then bursting out again. Damn. I wonder if the director was an Alien(s) fan? The second movie would have come out a year before this. Huh.)
“It’s been hard living without an externally defined ladder of success.” That’s how I’ve been explaining it to myself. Explaining ‘the depression’.
I was a student, then a grad student, then a post-doc, then a professor, then I dropped out of that (hehe! a tenure-track walk out), then I was looking for a job, then I found a job, then… then?… then there was no ‘then’ then.
(Holy crap. He looks like Mark Paul Gossler. This is— wait. This adult man who is about to get an erotic massage sleeps in the same room as his parents. … Do you think massage therapists get annoyed with the slapdash way their profession is represented in porn?)
I mean, maybe it’s just observer bias, because that ‘then’ is now? (Oh! That’s different.) But nah, it feels like something else. It feels lazier. More stagnant. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I— I took one of them but then stopped to sit by the ditch about ten yards into it and haven’t gotten up yet. I wonder if I took the right path? I also wonder if I can just fall asleep here by the side of the road (in a yellow wood) and wake up when this is over.
(Now they’re in a hotel room jacuzzi, in paper-thin white briefs, drinking Miller Lite, talking about how much the ladies will want the hard-ons they’re currently developing. God bless the pornographic suspension of disbelief. Don’t get me wrong—I have zero problem believing that human sexuality is fluid enough for three nominally heterosexual men to have a non-sexual hot tub experience, followed by non-sexual bed wrestling that becomes sexual in passing, followed by gay sex, followed by a heterosexual “night out looking for pussy”. Humans, especially bros, are just funny that way. But these guys are not selling the heterosexy dialogue. Le sigh.)
I mean, should I write about sex while watching porn? Like, instead of writing about depression? Depending on how one defines “sexual intercourse”, I’ve had between 10 and 70 sexual partners. LOL. I could give you more details if you really wanted, because I’ve been keeping a detailed record since I was 14, all in one amazingly still-intact notebook. It’s mostly “we kissed once” and “really good backrub, but then nothing happened” for the first three or four pages. That pattern repeats, oddly enough, around the time I lived in San Diego, but instead of “really good backrub” it’s more like “really good beer, but then nothing happened and I did not call him back”. Because San Diego was a strange time for me— boys who tasted like department stores and kissed like ham sandwiches.
(Apparently they’re sailors? And now there’s some toe sucking dress uniform action going on. This film is somebody’s dream of perfection, I’m sure. The music is good for writing, at least. Oh! I bet this is set in San Diego! Huh.)
LOL. San Diego was a strange time for me. San Diego was five years of my life. That’s not a strange time, that’s a lifetime. A strange lifetime. San Diego was a strange lifetime for me. I miss it now, too, oddly. Not the lifestyle— academia was killing me— but I do miss my life there. I miss it like I miss my nightmares when I don’t have them for a while. Or more like I really missed my insomnia when I got into my mid-twenties and mostly stopped having it. Yeah, I miss San Diego like I miss insomnia. That’s about right.
(Dammit! The movie just cut out. It’s an online copy and it appears to be incomplete. I assume this was the last scene, though, because… IDK, it felt last-sceney before it cut out. C’est la vie. — Nope. I found another version. I can finish the movie. Thank goddess. What an esoteric thing to feel incomplete over. Also, about this last scene, if you’ll bear with me for a minute— there was a paintball survivalist exercise with these three guys in camo fatigues, and one is like “Let’s make it interesting. Loser gets stripped and tied to a tree over night.” and they’re all like, “Yeah, sounds good.”
Now listen, given the kind of people I assume nominally straight men to be, I have no doubt that getting stripped and tied to a tree sounds like a reasonable outcome for losing a paintball match. Heteronormative masculinity is weird like that. But, freals, I just did a good amount of internet searching, and if you tie someone up and hang them from their wrists— as this hairless naked man is now hanging—, they’ll suffocate and die in a matter of hours. He never would have lasted all night. It’s a fucking death sentence. His friends are executing him for losing at paintball and he’s totally okay with that. Good thing they cut him loose and decided to bone instead. Also also, did the US military ever really issue camo bikini briefs?)
Fun fact— the history of English pronouns is really fascinating. He, she, and they all come from historically distinct and disparate sources. And she is really fascinating because, iirc, it’s also distinct from the history and etymology of her (whereas he/him and they/them are both nominative/accusative pairs, like who/whom). From what I remember (along with some real quick googley work), her has a mostly standard etymological development from Old English (related to he and him), whereas the origin of she is unknown and hotly debated. See? I used to know stuff that was neat to know. Ask me about IndoEuropeans some day.
(Shawn just got home. He’s commenting on how bored everyone who’s fucking looks. I mean, bro. Husband of mine. Dear one. Just appreciate it for what it is. Also, have you seen how big those penises are? And listen to that soundtrack! … No, it’s not ‘vaporwave’. Just… no.)
Husband has taken a picture of me, writing, with porn in the background. He appreciates the process.
(Big Guns ended oddly. Very oddly. And now it makes absolutely no sense why the first scene opened with a title card telling us it was “WINTER”. Like, maybe I missed it, but that’s the only exposition of setting we got in the whole two hours. I get it, we needed to know it was WINTER so we’d know it was too cold to go to school (but never too cold to jack off), but there’s no overarching narrative that makes that noteworthy. The guy in the first scene could have just woken up and started fondling himself, without ever telling us anything about school or the weather, and nothing would have changed. What am I missing here?)
***
Okay, so that’s that. This was supposed to be a short story written while watching Big Guns in its entirety, but it came out as more of a rambling essay. A series of disconnected vignettes, just like the film. Happy trails, yall. Hope to see you soon. … COME AGAIN! lololol.
