by The Notorious H.A.M.

Created on: March 02, 2007   Last Updated: April 23, 2007

"You're Always Seventeen In Your Home Town"

Credit to Cross Canadian Ragweed for the title, but for the behavior, all the credit goes to me.

I don't know what it is about spending time with your parents, but invariably, if you are around them long enough, you always revert to your godawful teenage behavior. Partly, they tend to never see you as much older than that (unless they are lecturing you on how you're too old to be acting this way, of course) - you will always be their child, no matter how old you get. But I think it's also partly that we don't see ourselves or them as much different than we were back then either. I know for me at least, my relationship with my parents is sort of a freeze frame of how it was just before I moved out, and though some things have changed with time, fundamentally it is still the same. I guess that's logical since fundamentally we are still the same people, too, though for me this is true only at the core - it's the core that counts in this story, though.

So I made it through visiting my family this last Christmas - no fights, no conversations about "the gay thing," not even any nagging about my hair or style of dress. But one night I was restless, and that restlessness coincided with my parents cranking the thermostat on Boring all the way up to max. Their big plans for the evening included CSI reruns and hooking up a new printer. My brother had to work early the next day, my other brother had already gone back to Lubbock for school, and my nephew wasn't staying with us either, so the restlessness just kept growing.

That's when I turned 17 again. I decided to go out, and then it hit me that it would be fun to see what a gay bar in West Texas would be like. Now, that would not have gone over well with the folks, so I had to make up a lie. I called my brother and he agreed to cover for me, though I didn't tell him I was going to a gay bar either just because we're not quite to the comfortable-with-talking-about-that stage. I took my dad's little Saturn he uses for work and pointed it at the Sin Citi Club in Odessa. It was a quiet night for them, but the people there were very friendly and I had a good time talking to everyone. I even got to appreciate watching lesbian drama unfold before me and being completely free and clear of all of it - that was quite refreshing (and for those of you saying right this very minute, "Oh, I hate drama - I avoid drama at all costs," you're kidding yourselves - life is drama, and you may as well

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