This Man Needs To Lose His Beard. Stat.

This is Jim. He has a beard.

As you can see, the beard is kind of his signature look. I have never seen Jim without the beard. I literally cannot imagine Jim without the beard.

The beard needs to go.

Now, one other thing you should know about Jim: He’s a doting godparent to the Meyer children. In fact, before they could speak, they used the sign for “beard” to refer to Uncle Jim. Uncle Jim is an axiom in the Meyers’ life; Uncle Jim shows up for dinner a couple times a week, does emergency spillover duty when one of the kids needs to be picked up.

Unfortunately, for the Meyer kids, their sister Rebecca is no longer an axiom in their lives.

You may remember Rebecca during the painful year-long period where I kept blogging about her, and her brain cancer. The cancer was horrendous on every level; the constant rollercoaster up of hope and then the crash down into the latest results, the stream of decisions as to what treatment would be right for this, the stream of fights for the Meyers to be good parents to all their children when poor Rebecca was rightfully occupying so much of their attention.

And also, this is America; if the Meyers hadn’t had good insurance, Rebecca’s death would have bankrupted them.

If you’ve ever read my book Flex, Aliyah is pretty much Rebecca. I didn’t set out to immortalize her; it’s just when I wrote a book with a scrappy, fearless, and funny kid, I cribbed notes from the scrappiest, the funniest, and the most fearless kid I knew. And I watched as the cancer spread through her brain and took her from us on her sixth birthday.

That’s why Jim’s beard needs to go.

Because Jim will be shaving his head for St. Baldrick’s charity to raise money to help fight childrens’ cancer, as he does every year. (As I would every year, but I decided I looked better bald.) And he’s put his beard on the line; if he can raise $5,000 by this Saturday – a big ask – he will shave that beard that Rebecca used to once tug.

He’ll do it because he knows what it’s like to lose a beloved child to cancer.

Which is why I ask you: please help raise $5,000 to shave Jim’s beard. It’s a big ask; he’s got a long way to go. But every dollar you donate goes to finding better ways to help save kids with cancer – and believe me, that’s one of the best uses for your spare dollars you can imagine.

The link is here. If you can donate, I ask, please. Do.

(And if you can’t donate this time around, may I ask that you share this page with your social media to help spread the word? Thanks.)

And We Forgot The Taste Of Bread: The Social Dynamics of Food

So as a reminder, I’ve just started an all-Soylent diet for a couple of weeks, eating nothing but nutritional goop in an attempt to reset my system.

And here’s the weird thing: Gini started early.

That’s not the weird thing – Gini always wants to go NOW NOW NOW, whereas I’m like “Hold on, I’mma sleep on this sofa until the starting gun.” Her attitude was, “If we gotta start, I’ll go on Thursday” and I shot back with, “I promised myself a weekend of ice cream and I’m gonna get a weekend of ice cream, so I’m on Monday.”

She was, of course, miserable.

Transitioning to Soylent will do that to you. We’re used to being able to spike our blood chemistry at a moment’s notice – some caffeine to jolt us awake, some sugar for quick-release carbs, whereas Soylent is like a nutritional IV pump – it’s slow, and steady, and if you’ve been relying on “I’m feeling sluggish so I’ll just make a cup of tea with sugar,” you will feel like you’re crashing all damn day.

So she was grumpy the whole weekend.

And I still had to eat.

Thursday, it wasn’t too bad – I had dinner with a friend. Friday, I scavenged leftovers.

But come Saturday….

We went out for a drive to hunt Pokemon, which is what we often do on weekends – and we got stuck for an hour in line at the car wash. And by the time we were done with the usual chores, I was hungry, and I said, “Can we stop at the drive-in for some food?”

I did not say it unthinkingly. I spoke as sensitively as I could: “If we’re gonna keep going, I need to keep eating” was my tone. And she said “fine” and we went to my favorite drive-in and got burgers – this was my last weekend before the long haul, after all – and Gini was kind enough not to say anything as I scarfed down some calories, but the seething anger she was concealing made me ashamed to eat.

The ensuing Pokemon hunt was short and and not very sweet. She wasn’t in a mood to enjoy anything. So we went home.

And come dinner, I could have anything! My cardiac issues be damned, I could go absolutely bezonkers. And I looked through takeout menu after takeout menu, deciding whether I’d have rich peanut-sauce Thai or a thick Chicago-style pizza, and then imagining Gini’s sadness as the scents of these things permeated the house and she couldn’t eat…

For my wild Saturday night dinner, I had Kraft macaroni and cheese. Because I knew she hated that shit, and it wouldn’t make her sad.

And come Sunday, I didn’t want to eat. Food had become a barrier between us. I mean, I had a chocolate milk because Gini didn’t like that – but all the foods we’d shared once had, in the course of three days, become a barrier. No longer could I say, “Hey, I got the new Coke Vanilla Orange, come take a sip.” No longer could I say “I got corned beef egg rolls at the Chinese store, try them with me!”

I couldn’t even drink a beer without feeling guilty that Gini – who loves her wine – was going wineless.

I let the moments slide by until my stomach rumbled, then snuck out without telling Gini to get some food, and gobbled it down before she could find the evidence.

And that’s when it became clear how much of our food habits are driven by socialization.

I said this in my prior writing on Soylent:

“Gini and I have been thinking about how to restructure our lives to eat better, but what we agreed we needed to start was a hard reset – something to jar us out of our normal habits of ‘Oh, a glass of wine here will be nice’ and ‘Well, since you’re having a wine I’ll have this cookie.'”

And what became crystal clear once the good will had stopped was how much crap we were eating because the other person covertly tolerated it. We do have a certain detante in our household – okay, yeah, we’ll eat well tonight, but we’re out to dinner at a nice restaurant, of course we’re going to try the appetizers. And we have guests in town, don’t we want to have a drink with them?

Food is not only a social lubricant, but a bargaining chip – I’ll overeat a little if you will.

That only became evident when, in the course of a weekend, I went from a welcoming “Hey, you wanna go for Mediterranean food tonight?” to dashing out to eat as little as possible.

Which is… well, it’s something to consider.

Because once we’re off the Soylent, Gini and I will have to consider how to eat better. And we love fine dining – that’s a joy I don’t want to give up, because the thrill of going out to new restaurants with friends and experimenting with high-class mushroom-and-gin drinks and trying some new sauce are part of who we are.

But there’s also a fair amount of low cuisine that creeps in. A glass of chocolate milk here. A bag of Chex Mix there. Stuff we both know is bad, and not particularly comforting – more like background radiation – but we both go, “Well, you’re eating that, so I’ll have this” and the pounds creep up over the years.

And as I engineer the new dietary habits, one of the axioms of this is that Shame does not work. Shame has never worked for us – yes, we should go to the gym, but we know we’d rather be at home. What worked for us, exercise-wise, was when I devised a plan that kicked away shame and locked us into mutual support – “I don’t want Gini to go to the gym alone today, and this is a lot of money we’re spending and I don’t want to waste it, so I guess I’ll go.”

That’s worked for almost two years now.

So when I’m thinking of a new diet, it’s tempting to go, “Well, just have Gini and I yell at each other!” But that wouldn’t work in the long run. I’d feel bad for a while, but in time, I’d just learn to pig out in quiet, like some sort of caloric spy.

What I need to ponder – and keep in mind this is a personal solution, whatever works for you may well fall flat at the arena of our personal psyches, so slow your roll when suggesting your One True Solution – is how to engineer a solution where Gini and I support each other in positive ways as opposed to negative ones. Which is difficult, because neither of us want to eat healthy – we want to be healthy, and Jesus is there a distinction to be had there.

So I’m pondering. Because it’s become apparent how much we enable each other. And we have to figure out how to enable each other to eat more broccoli and less Chex Mix.

The Bar Shouldn’t Be This Low, Fellas: Some Truths On Emotional Labor.

I think a lot of straight guys are poisoned by all the emphasis on HOW TO GET SEX FROM A WOMAN – because honestly, “Getting laid” isn’t all that difficult. Assuming you haven’t inflated your incel-size ego enough that you demand a perfectly-plucked, porn-perfect partner to satiate your kinda-saggy, kinda-unshaved body, then finding an enthusiastic partner to hook up with isn’t hard.

HINT: You don’t have to trick women; many of them, too, are looking to get laid. It’s often just a matter of convincing someone “Hi, I am not a stalking murderer and also the sex will be fun.” Which is another low bar to clear, but hello here we are.

(I say this knowing that some dude will most likely reply, in voluminous detail, all the ways that women have let him down even though he followed all the steps and it’s not that easy and you don’t understand my travails and my answer will be, “…do you think this makes you sound like someone who’s fun to have sex with?”)

Anyway. Finding someone to share fun times with is the comparatively simple bit, because women who want to have sex are motivated to help you along with that process.

The difficult part is what comes afterwards.

Because what I see way too much of is men who have grown fond of someone they’re having sex with, so they shuffle down the prearranged path to move in/get engaged/get married/have kids, and they’ve gotten the sex but still have very little understanding of the sex-provider they’re with.

And what all too often happens is that they have a female partner, who is often conditioned by society to tend to everyone’s needs, who takes care of all the things they don’t like doing. Which takes on a variety of things that these dudes may be so alienated from their so intent that they may not even recognize they require – oh, they’ll bitch about having to go out with Wanda and Herman again, but truth is they get lonely if their wife doesn’t arrange the socialization. They want their laundry done just so, and rely on their wives to tell them when they’re looking too grubby to go to the big event. They rely on the fridge to be filled by their wives, so when they go for food it’s just sort of there.

Now here’s the thing:

What the wife is doing is not necessarily bad.

In an ideal marriage, both partners are pitching in to tend to each other’s needs. I mean, my wife manages the prescriptions in our home, but I’m the one who monitors our health and nudges her to see the doctor when she doesn’t wanna. My wife handles me when I’m in a depressive fit, but I also try to look for nights out doing fun things so we don’t sit at home curdling.

That’s a functional relationship.

But what too many of the dudes who have put all their character points into “getting sex” instead of “maintaining functioning relationships” do is to just assume their wives are okay until they complain.

There’s the real trick.

There’s a concept called “emotional labor” which takes on a bunch of complex forms, but what it often boils down to for these men is the skill of “Pondering what would make your partner happy before they get upset enough to complain about it.”

That shit will save your relationship pronto.

Lemme give you a real-life example: I’m a slob. My wife wants the kitchen clean. And about three times a week, I look at the kitchen and go, “That’s fine.” Then I look at it through my wife’s eyes and go, “No, she thinks that’s messy. She’s not said anything to me about it, and she’s too busy to clean it up right now, but it’s worsening her day a little every time she walks into that kitchen.”

So I clean it up.

Now, there’s a loudmouthed contingent that says, “Why are you rewarding that behavior? She should ask for what she wants!” But that’s a dimwitted approach, for two reasons:

The first is that getting to the point of vocalizing a complaint is a process that involves several stages of irritants. First, you have to recognize the problem – and Gini may just be feeling the subliminal “This is a crappy place to live” vibe for a long time before it bubbles to the surface why she’s unhappy – and then you have to decide whether it’s worth trying to convince someone else to fix it for you. (And if you’re prone to arguing back that the kitchen looks fine to you, then they have to weigh a potential argument in mind.) And then they have to ponder the way to say it, or just wait until they snap.

That’s a lot of other irritations to load onto something that already makes ’em feel strained. In fact, depending on how conflict-averse they are, they may choose the lesser of two miseries and clean the kitchen themselves, figuring that “avoiding an argument and feeling isolated” is a better call than “getting into a fight and dealing with my husband being pissy all evening.”

But even if you didn’t believe in all of that, consider the difference here:

Wife waits until kitchen is messy enough to reach critical mass, chooses to vocalize a complaint. You do the thing. At that point, your best outcome is “Gosh, they’re nice enough to move when I bug them” – but it’s probably closer to “Jesus, I had to ask?”

Wife walks into kitchen, discovers it clean. At that point, the worst outcome is “Just like I expected,” but the probable outcome is “Oh, wow, he was thinking of me and I don’t have to do that – thank God.”

One outcome is grudging. The other speaks love.

And so as a long-term partner, my dude, your goal is to not just passively wait until your wife boots your butt into action, but to study her – see what vexes her, mark it in advance, and proactively change your behavior to make her feel better.

And yeah, that involves the effort of remembering to watch for things when you could just be sipping a beer, and to get up from watching TV to handle the kids when you know that she’d handle it eventually.

That’s the emotional labor: that commitment to not just passively consuming any kindness your wife chooses to give you, but to actively contemplate her as a person and deduce what kindnesses will actually make her life easier.

And there is a danger here, because a lot of dudes try to apply stereotypical fixes they read about elsewhere – “I’ll bring her flowers and book a weekend retreat.” But if you don’t have money for flowers and a cabin, maybe that’s just gonna stress her out more.

The trick is to figure out kindnesses that suit her. Her specifically. Not some idealized version of a woman, or a woman you saw in a movie, but here.

And here’s the other secret:

A lot of those kindnesses are really mundane things.

They’re filling up the tank the night before when you know she has a lot of errands to run.

They’re taking the kids out for a walk so she can have a bubble bath without being bothered.

They’re respecting that her job is every bit as important as yours, and offering to switch shifts to run some errands when she’s in crunch mode.

They’re listening when she’s talking about something that seems meaningless or boring to you, and trying to figure out what is of interest to her in it, even if you eventually say, “Hey, can we change the subject?”

And yeah. Not every female partner is a caregiver, and a lot of them are also selfish and don’t care much about you, and if that’s the case you have every much a right to leave as they do with an unresponsive partner. There’s bad eggs in every gender, or lack thereof.

But what often happens is that a lot of these style of dudes get dumped on the floor in a divorce, and they’re struggling because all these quiet services that their partner used to provide are gone, and they’re lonely and the wrong food is in the fridge and what the fuck is this medication for and it’s an awful, lonely position to be in…

One that can often be avoided if instead of being an unthinking recipient of kindness, you spend a few extra minutes a day figuring out how to be kind to your partner and actually having them be surprised with loving acts from out of nowhere.

That’s a form of emotional labor. It’s honestly not that hard once you realize the need for it.

It’s also one of the most useful ones to know.

Welp, I’m Going Back On The All-Soylent Diet: Here’s Why

In 2014, I drank nothing but Soylent for a week. It was mostly for a lark – hey, here’s this Silicon Valley goop people say can replace full meals! What actually happens if I drank sugarless pancake batter, and nothing but nutritionally-complete pancake batter?

The answer was surprising in a lot of ways:

• It was comforting not have to worry about my health. As a man who’s survived a triple bypass, every meal is a mild panic – Can I allow myself this? Will it kill me? I should be eating something better – so to have all my choices narrowed down to “Drink this sandy sludge and find better things to ponder” was surprisingly soothing.
• It ruined our social life. Ever think about how many excuses to get together with your friends are based on food? “Let’s get a drink.” “Tea?” “We’ll do lunch.” Even for ten days, we wound up being weird pariahs – “We’ll go to your house and stare blithely at your food.” We managed, and our friends didn’t yell at us or anything, but it was off-puttingly isolating.
• It highlighted how much of my day consists of micro-rewards – “Oh, I made it to noon, time for my coffee.” “I’m stressed, let’s pop a cookie.” And without that, I drifted.

And when it was done, we had several cases of Soylent in the basement, which we refused to get rid of in case there was an apocalypse and only we would control the health-batter.

But here’s the thing: I’ve been really stressed over the last few months because of an impending book release, and my stress manifests in the form of overeating. And Gini and I have been thinking about how to restructure our lives to eat better, but what we agreed we needed to start was a hard reset – something to jar us out of our normal habits of “Oh, a glass of wine here will be nice” and “Well, since you’re having a wine I’ll have this cookie.”

And the Soylent in the basement crawled out and said “Y HALLO.”

So yeah. Gini’s already started drinking the Soylent – the expiry date says it’s useless as of 2014, but she’s not dead yet – and I’ll do so on Monday. We won’t do this forever, but before we can kickstart into a finer diet, we need a cleanse to break us of these ridiculous habits.

Which isn’t to say that you do. But eating is an addiction, and unlike normal addictions where you can say “Well, I Just won’t smoke crack any more,” being addicted to eating involves saying “Well, I need three puffs of crack every eight hours, but no more than that.” If I could, I’d go cold turkey, but the irony of the phrase “cold turkey” kind of says it all there, folks.

So I’ll drink goop for two weeks. And see where it goes from there.

And the irony is that the stress I am enduring is because my book The Sol Majestic is coming out in June, and I am currently planning all the ways I will dance for you and say, “Hey, my words are magnificent! You should totally buy my book!” – which is not a thing I am easeified doing, because part of me believes that I am a poor writer and how dare I promote my book when actual writers hold the field.

(…did I mention you get free swag for preordering The Sol Majestic? Well, you do. And you can win a free copy of my book for signing up for my newsletter and GAH I AM MELTING DOWN JUST TYPING THAT.)

“Where’s the irony, though?” you ask. And it’s this:

The Sol Majestic is a book about science fiction fine dining. It has lavishly-described meals made by futuristic methods, designed to make your mouth water. And my upcoming signings, if possible, will have some of this food baked in (hee), with possible drinks and restaurant stops and food blogging tie-ins…

ALL WHILE I AM DRINKING TASTELESS SLUDGE.

So yeah. To combat the stress of promoting a book about food, I will reduce food to a gritty slurry. And yes, you can flavor your Soylent to make it taste good, but I don’t want my Soylent to taste good, I want it to become an obligatory background noise so I don’t reward myself with another gallon of Fruity-Loops-flavored Soylent, and so back to the nutritious grit it is.

Of course I’ll blog this journey.

But I thought you’d like to know in case you’d want to know why I’m going BACK TO THE GOOPTURE.

Sign Up For My Newsletter, Win A Free ARC Of My Book THE SOL MAJESTIC!

I’ll be doing a book tour to promote my fine-dining-in-space gay romance book The Sol Majestic in June and July. And the biggest problem with book tours is this conversation:

“A book tour? When are you coming to my town?”
“…I was there last week.”

But that’s the problem! Between the billions of Facebook posts and Tweets and other aspects, people don’t get the message that I’m coming – even though I’ve said it a billion times before! So I asked my fellow authors: What works to get the word out?

They told me: newsletters.

So. If you sign up for my newsletter at https://www.theferrett.com/newsletter/ within the next two weeks, I will enter you into a raffle to win a free advance copy of The Sol Majestic – which, if not the best book I’ve ever written, is certainly the closest book to my heart because it’s got love of food and people being kind to each other and investigations of what art really means and also how do we make the work better, all overlaid with wild imaginations of what it would mean to make the finest cuisine with the weirdest sci-fi technologies.

You can win it just for giving me your email address, people.

(And also, if you pre-order it and follow the directions, you’ll get a free signed bookplate and a secret recipe and oh you know the drill by now. Click the link for info, if you must.)

Anyway. Gimme your email, and from then on I’ll send you an email about once a month with my most popular blog posts, and the books I liked, and excerpts from what I’m writing, and also hey I’ll be in your goddamned town wanna join me for free donuts and drinks afterwards?

(NOTE: All my book signings involve donuts and going out for after-signing beverages. I like to eat, what can I say?)

So head to https://www.theferrett.com/newsletter/ and sign up, and in two weeks we’ll see if you’ve won. And prepare for another book tour as I try to hit as many spots as possible in the US, and maybe even Canada this time.

How To Turn Someone With Herpes Down Without Being A Jerk

FIRST, A DISCLAIMER: Invariably, when I post an essay on “How to be nice to people,” some folks get offended. “Why are you asking me to put in extra effort for strangers?” they sneer. “I’m so sick of being told how to talk! Why do I have to learn these things?!”

Alas, the relevant clause here is “Without being a jerk.” There are plenty of no-extra-effort ways to turn someone down; they also happen to be methods that hurt people’s feelings.

Top tip: Being nice to people usually involves going the extra mile.

So rather than dealing with the usual blowhards who are furious about having to burn their poor, overworked brain cells on superfluous concepts like “empathy,” I will delete the comments of anyone who complains about having to be nice to HSV carriers and replace them with a comment saying, “@USERNAME would like you to know they are a jerk.” Commenting on this blog post means you consent to this.

THEN A SECOND DISCLAIMER: Remember that not turning down someone with herpes is also a perfectly acceptable default. But if you’re not comfortable with someone’s status…

“Why Do You Want To Die In A Car Wreck?”
You probably got in a car sometime in the last year or so. It’s well known that people die in car crashes a lot; it’s one of the most common causes of death.

Why did you want to die?

Your answer, of course, is probably “I didn’t want to die, I just needed to get to the mall.” And yet you accepted that risk of dying, knowing that hundreds of thousands of people have died in car accidents, knowing that car rides are inherently dangerous.

“But the only way to ensure you never have any risk of dying in a car accident is never riding in a car!”

Bingo.

(Well, not actually true, as someone my wife knew once died sleeping when someone crashed through their bedroom, but close enough.)

Point is, at some point most of you tallied up the risks of driving in a car – an act so dangerous you have to be professionally trained and get a license for it – and said, “Yeah, I’m willing to risk death for convenience.” (And bonus points if you ever said, “I’ll get in a car with a stranger I summoned from the Internet and pay them to drive for me.”)

You didn’t want to die in a car crash; you just wanted to get places more conveniently. And you wanted that benefit so much that you weighed the risks, decided the benefit was larger than the potential downside of losing a limb to a drunk driver, and proceeded to hurl yourself into harm’s way.

Nobody wants to die in a car crash.

Nobody wants to get herpes, either.

So when you say, “I don’t want to get herpes” to someone you’re turning down, you’re being unthinkingly snide by implying that the people who have sex with these folks do want to get herpes. They don’t. Like you, they’ve looked at the risks, calculated them – albeit differently from the way you do – and decided that the benefits of fine sex with this person outweigh the slight potential of getting herpes.

And it is – or can be – a low risk. With modern treatments, the risks of having sex with someone with known herpes are pretty slim. I know of at least three married couples who’ve been partnered for ten years minimum where the one has yet to catch herpes from the other. I get that you don’t want to get it, but managed properly it’s roughly as distant a risk as dying in a car accident.

…a risk made even more complicated by the fact that you may have herpes right now and not even know it. True story: I had a friend who was dating a guy for six years – a man who’d been tested negative for herpes on multiple occasions over decades, simply because either the right tests weren’t being used or he hadn’t had his first outbreak. He was as safe as it could be ascertained. And it turns out he had a latent strain, and he had his first outbreak, and she caught it.

Again. This isn’t an ad for “WHY YOU SHOULD WANT HERPES” – there’s a reason I wear condoms – but as a disease, there’s a lot of people who do have it right now and don’t even know because for them, it’s not that inconvenient.

Which is why some other people take other risks. You don’t have to; in fact, I assume you won’t, and that’s fine. I’m not shaming anyone for deciding not to have sex with anyone for whatever reason you choose. But when you say “I don’t want to get herpes,” that carries some bad implications.

What should you say? “I’ve read up on it, and I’m sorry, but I’m not comfortable with the risks.”

That’s honest, and it doesn’t look down on anyone who chooses to say “Yes” instead. Because the only way to absolutely ensure you never pick up herpes is not to have sex with anyone – and if you’re out there having sex, the best you can do is mitigate the risks, not eliminate them.

Don’t Assume Herpes Was A Conscious Choice.
Some people did pick up herpes by having sex with people – and as I’ve argued in the past, that should carry no more stigma than picking up a cold from work. Just like getting in a car risks death, interacting with other people on any level risks catching some disease.

However, there are some folks who picked herpes up through nonconsensual means. Their mother had it and passed it on to them, or someone who sexually assaulted them had it and passed it on.

Which means when you’re talking with someone about their herpes status, it’s best not to imply in any way that this was some sort of punishment for sleeping around. You don’t know. Don’t be a jerk.

Offer What You Can Outside Of Sex.
One of the things that hurts people the most is the way that revealing their HSV+ status gets them insta-dumped. They’re having a good time talking with someone, sparks are flying, and then SEE YA.

Now usually that’s a way of saying “If I can’t fuck you, I don’t need you,” which is a pretty jerky way of interacting with people anyway. And I’m certainly not saying you need to continue to talk with someone as a friend when all you want in your life right now is a date.

But if you’ve started to make a friend, and you could use a friend, why not see if they’re amenable?

That’s not universally applicable, of course – the “If I can’t fuck you, I don’t need you” attitude isn’t unique to the non-herpetic population. And many folks would see the friendship as a sad consolation prize they don’t want. But some might want to still have a scening buddy, or someone they can get whipped by but can’t get fucked by, or just someone to chat with online.

The cold disappearance is what often hurts the most. Sometimes that’s necessary; by no means should you hang around someone out of pity, because that road leads to disaster. But sometimes you can hang a left on that road and wind up in buddytown, and if you can, that’s helpful all round.

Ask In Advance.
So you’re hip-deep in a hot makeout session that’s trending towards Teh Sexx0r, and your partner wriggles uncomfortably and says, “Um…. you should know… I have herpes.”

That’s a bad time to find out, hoss.

My friends have told me stories that boil down to “Formerly amorous person leaps off them like a scalded cat, backs out of the room with the air of a man escaping a plague zombie” or, even worse, “Lust-addled person goes for it, freaks out, has lots of tests and then decides crap, they can’t handle the HSV thing.”

Look. HSV is startlingly common. Somewhere between 10 and 25% of people have it. If you’re dating, it will come up. So discuss it. Proactively. If sex is in the air, say, “Hey, the last time I was tested was in November, and my results were negative.”

Start the discussion in advance rather than just assuming it’s all good.

Read The Comments.
If past experience is a guide, people with herpes will weigh in on the shittiest (and, hopefully, nicest) ways they’ve been turned down. Listen to them. Take notes. Because if you want to be kind, part of that kindness involves keeping your eyes open.

A Teenaged Memory: Queen At Live Aid

Ever remember something that made you so ineffably happy at the time, yet in retrospect it was heartbreakingly sad?

That was Live Aid for me.

I watched Bohemian Rhapsody last night, where Queen makes their triumphant performance before a massive crowd at Wembley stadium, and I’ve heard my old friends reminiscing about their shared experiences watching Live Aid – resonating to Queen, remembering all the other songs that thundered out across the world that day, highlighting their love of music.

I didn’t love music. I don’t think I even had a Walkman at that point. I’d heard songs, sure, I listened to them, but I didn’t really have a favorite band.

Possessing a favorite band would have involved having friends, which I didn’t.

Oh, I suppose some people devised their favorite band without the outside pressure of buddies asking them to defend their choices, but for me, I just like what I like. I don’t rank things. I knew other people had favorite bands, but I associated that with friendship – they chose bands the way old nations waved flags, clustering into groups of heavy metal and pop and the weirdo classicals, continually trading music and playing each other songs and what did you think of that, aren’t they good, how do they compare.

And I… just had radio.

It was a pretty barren thing.

The magic of music is often not just in the melody, but the way a song can come to capture a moment of your life. I remember Iron Maiden as the fierce triumph of battling past anxiety to attend my first music concert, Duran Duran as the girl I liked so much I took her to a pop show I didn’t like and felt her head on my shoulder, The Time Warp as that crowd of rowdies I came to fall in with at the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

But what is music when you’re nothing?

I had no friends, no social groups, no anything. My life was something I worked to avoid. I read books because that was like living something, anything, for a while, but my actual existence consisted of sliding like a ghost through the hallways at school and hoping nobody bullied me that day. My family fretted, but the best part of my day consisted of locking myself in my room and forgetting myself.

What would music capture, then?

Why would I want to relive it?

And yet everyone I vaguely knew – I only vaguely knew people – seemed very excited about Live Aid, which seemed nice to me, it was for charity, and a lot of bands were contributing.

I asked them whether they wanted to watch it at my house.

I don’t recall how that happened – they were mostly acquaintances, and risking rejection must have been such a terror for me that I whited out the memory of it. And it must have been late in the school year as well, as Live Aid happened in July, so maybe I was giddy in the last weeks of sophomore year. But…

I remember having to rearrange the house. I didn’t have people over. I only watched TV in my room, which was too small and smelled of stress. So they decorated the basement, and moved the TV there so I could have some privacy,
and put bowls of chips and cookies out.

Three people showed up.

One of them was a girl.

And though I saw Queen live, I have no memory of that. All I remember is a glorious contact high – because I had friends over, people who wanted to be with me, and maybe it wasn’t me but the concert they wanted to see, but they also wanted my company and maybe that wasn’t so bad.

And they talked about the music and oohed and aahed over the performances and we cheered whenever the money tallies were announced, but really I kept thinking, in amazement: There is a girl. In my house.

I never thought that would happen.

I didn’t have any designs on her – well, I mean, I had a massive crush on any female who didn’t reject me, but all those crushes were bound so tight I could never let any aspect of that seep out. But she was a nerdy girl like me, and very happy to see her bands at an actual party, and in retrospect she may have been as lonely as I was, or maybe she was just an extrovert.

Yet what I remember is that I had spent the last three years honestly believing that no woman would enter my house at all, ever, I’d be forty and slouching back after work to an empty apartment the way my bedroom was empty now, and endless decades of isolation and insanity would erode me because I had no concept of friendship, and yet…

Here I was. At a party. With boys and girls, and nobody seemed to be mocking me.

It was, I swear to you, the best day of 1985.

There was music. But mostly I sat back listening to other people talk, perhaps too quiet, but just bathing in this brief illusion of normality, because this is a life that other people had and I never would but God had gifted me with this one brief moment to sustain me and thank you God, thank you, thank you for giving me a glimpse of the life that other people have.

They left early, of course. We weren’t old enough to drive, and the parents had to pick them up. And before nightfall I was back in my room-cum-prison, eating the last of the chips, feeling the loneliness set back in.

I probably should have asked them for another party, maybe to see a movie, but that felt like too much.

I didn’t have another party that summer. Or that fall. Or that winter.

I didn’t call up the girl, or the other boy – the third attendee was my friend Bryan, and sometimes we hung out, but mostly the summer was just what the rest of my life was, which was to say going out to places that my parents made me yet coming home alone.

Yet every day I remembered the party.

I still do.

And that was the most brilliant moment of 1985 for me, and yet it was so small, such a trivial moment, such a thing where awkward me should have called up the girl and the boy and tried to be normal and yet I was so scared and so used to isolation that it never occurred to me that we could get together without a worldwide event to draw us.

I could have had friends. I think. It’s so easy to imagine that now.

Yet all I had was one party – a flickering ember that dwindled, dwindled, dwindled over the course of a long winter, the residual heat that kept me from committing suicide when I contemplated the desolation that was my future, and some days I wish I could find that young unwashed Ferrett and tell him that he’s worthy of love, he should call, he can do this.

Then some days I look at old adult Ferrett in fear that he’ll put his hand on the doorknob to his house with his wife and his loving children and his beautiful partners and clever friends and that doorknob will turn out to be that prison-handle and all of this will be some elaborate teenaged fantasy I created because it was better than going mad from despondency.

I left that room, one day, in 1985. I had a party. It was a good party. And I’ve had several parties since.

But some rooms you never really leave.