all the fine messes from so long ago

It wasn't too long ago I was having an old discussion with the same old objections raised, and it's always a little sad when that one comes back to me in that same old way.

Of course Ernie and Bert are lovers.

I'm never sure why so many people have this insane, insulting compulsion to say "but…but, they're just puppets. They don't have a life outside of TV. How can a puppet be gay?"

This comes from Obama-worshipping well-educated white people, who just look quizzically at you and, with a few words, seek to erase the glorious intimate dynamic between famous pairings even as they don't question why a frog would fuck a pig, as long as the frog and pig are validated by illusory gender dimorphism propagated by lifeless dimwits driven by the terror of a world filled with infinite shades of grey and subtleties that require introspection.

It's a whole other subject, though, and I won't belabor the point just now.

Still, it just reminded me of something that has always held me aloft, all through the ugliest eras and the roughest times. For people like us, the world has been full of lovers, all the way back to what may well be the first story any of our species can remember. Me, though—I'm a man of the twentieth century, through and through, and I've found my analogues in the media of my era, and realized my own ideal visions of intimacy in a collision of the sublime and the absurd.

Lovers abound, and that's partly because I don't buy the big distinctions between friends and lovers. Love is love, and it's really all about degrees and boundaries and our abilities to let go of our reservations, and I believe that more with each passing moment, when I find that so much of what would be one single romantic relationship in my life is actually distributed across a variety of bonds and sympaticoes with people near and far and gone forever. What that means, ultimately, is a very good question.

But I know the dynamic that most moves me, and I've had it in relationships of all types.

Laurel and Hardy were lovers, and the best kind, at that.

I don't really care that they weren't, because they are fictional characters, tied up loosely with their actual, off-screen selves, and because the real joy of being the pain-in-the-ass that I am means I can be as arbitrary and contradictory as I like.

Snoopy and Woodstock were lovers, Krazy Kat and Ignatz were lovers, and Laverne and Shirley, Lucy and Ethel, Pinky and the Brain all knew things they weren't telling the rest of us. Bruce and young Mr. Grayson knew a good thing when they saw it, sliding down greasy poles to the Batcave, Calvin and Hobbes needed nothing of the rest of the world to make them happy, and Felix and Oscar didn't seem that put out by their inability to date or reunite with their wives.

I don't think Abbott and Costello were, though Jerry and Dean—definitely.

Tom and Jerry dated, a long time ago, and there's still some love left. Gildy and Judge Hooker were red hot married, Jack and Rochester knew damn well Mary belonged properly on the periphery, and little Will Robinson never had a thing to worry about with Dr. Smith and that bubbleheaded boobie of a Robot clanging around together. You can't tell me for one minute that Gilligan never climbed down to that lower hammock. Not a chance.

And the people who sp-sp-sputtered and groused about Brokeback Mountain really need a goddamn clue about what happens in isolated environments where their freaking moronic either/or assinine gender role bullshit get cut off from peer pressure and sociocultural reinforcement feedback cycles.

For me, coming out wasn't so much an experience of suddenly not being "all alone in the world" anymore, because there were legions of examples for me to look to about how transcendent and magical love is, even for pairs of chicks and dudes. Oddly, I think I was more socialized into the notion that healthy relationships just depend on a nice balance and exchange of cavalier irresponsibility and pompous irascibility, which goes on to explain a lot about me.

My first best friend and I had that dynamic, to a point, and my best friend in high school and I were so clearly defined by the Laurel and Hardy interplay that the kids lining the hallways hoped to taunt us by singing "Dance of the Cuckoos" at us in an unusually on-point jibe for mean highschoolers. It was okay, though. I saw it, clearly, and celebrated it, at least to myself.

I'm usually the fat one, of course, even though I wasn't actually fat back then. There's just that natural part of me that's that big adventurous, overstepping, indignant, arrogant, blowhard, and that's okay.

It all makes me miss my friend Allen all the more, seeing as he's been off on his own adventures for eight years now. We were about as Lucy and Ethel as you could get without tucking a pair of ding-dongs away from sight, and had adventures and arguments and would just get in the car and drive aimlessly for the better part of a day without caring where we'd end up. There wasn't a sexual dynamic, of course, with me being in a relationship for the bulk of our friendship, but these things are shadings, levels of intimacy, and far less important than people imagine.

So many of my relationships are all in the past now.

Some just settled into lower levels of intimacy, albeit with the warm afterglow of long history, and some just faded away. People have died, married into relationships that suited them more, gone off cursing my name, moved away as their own adventures called them elsewhere. Somehow in the midst of career change and focusing on diet and finance and getting my life together, I pretty much stopped having one.

I wonder, sometimes, if I can even imagine what a relationship would be like anymore.

TCM finally screened a pack of Laurel and Hardy films recently, caught nicely by my Tivo, and I've been watching them since. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur, as I show these to friends and the reaction is usually a sort of noncommittal shrug with the occasional comment of "well, I guess they're kinda classics, but…" and I'm always gobsmacked, because those two just crack me the fuck up, to use the vulgar parlance for emphatic accompaniment. I just don't get how people aren't fascinated and entertained by them, and by that richly textured dynamic, full of both obvious overstatement and nuance, and what a model it is for how two people can be so close that they can fight like cats and dogs and still walk away into the grainy black and white credit sequence with no doubt that they are with the most important person in the world.

It's nostalgia for a time I never experienced, and relationships of a kind I haven't had, with one recent painful exception and one recenter and frustrating attempt at an exception, in a long, long time, of course, but I'm okay with that. We can't always be as finely-tuned and put-together as we like to think we are.

For now, it's all about this one moment, just a scene from a film that I watch over and over because it is so joyous, and so sweet and open and amazing that it reminds me that such things are still possible in the world. If I ever am that close to another person again, we will watch this, and practice, and I will wear baggy, patched-up pants and a hat, and the world will spin around us, like it's really meant to, just for a minute or two.

In the meantime, I'll just have to continue to get in my own fine messes, and practice my own dance steps. I'm not sure if I'm the fat one anymore, or the skinny guy with the dumb smile, or maybe a little of each, rationed out for the long winter, and I'm even less certain what difference it makes. Sometimes you just content yourself with the possibility of joy, and hold out for more than the bare minimum.