facebook is gonna make me cry!

Sitting in the Breakroom in Oakland. The music is good, clubby. The guy next to me is trying to explain John Cage's experimental music to his girlfriend. I'm trying to read the Iliad, but who can concentrate? Apparently Patroklos and Achilleus were lovers. Is that supposed to excite me? My professor thinks so, but he assumes that all his students are nineteen and straight. More Thai food, this time with Geri. The economy's so bad that they're giving free Thai Iced Tea or Coffee with each entree. My coffee is gritty. Geri dilutes here tea with ice water to make it last longer because the economy's so bad. We look at the tuna strainers at Smart and Final, and we run the joke into the ground, as usual. My cousin from Louisiana calls. I'm nervous. He keeps calling me Kev and Man, with a southern accent that I wonder if I ever had. He sounds like such a sweet guy, really normal in ways that I never was. But he doesn't seem to think that I'm a freak which is surprising. Actually I'm worried about having to say the words, I'm gay. Not because I'm ashamed, but because it just seems silly to have to say it at this point. He doesn't ask, he's a hipster. He tells me about my father. Still lives in the same house, a hermit, worries all the time, does his own thing. Weird, weird, weird. In an even weirder, and perhaps beautiful, Facebook reconnection, I found one of my friends from middle school. She lives with her girlfriend in Armistead, across the river from Coushatta, and works at the truck stop/casino which is next to the Burger King. There was no Burger King when I was there. I've missed so much! It's not really surprising that she's gay, she was always kind of butch. What's surprising to me is that she still lives there. That she never felt the need to get away. I guess I didn't have to runaway, after all.