Dumped, Drunk and Dating

I used to be a really big supporter of gay marriage, but now that I’ve broken up with my boyfriend, I’m an even fiercer advocate for gay divorce. Why leave a trail of mere ex-boyfriends and lovers in your wake when you can pepper the city with ex-husbands? There’s a more powerful stoicism to being a divorcee, a sort of Liz Taylor-esque wounded nobility, if you will.

What makes my particular divorce a little hairy is that I still live with my ex. After we ended things, he tried to impose a hookup rule for the house: no strangers allowed over “for safety reasons.” The next week, he broke his own rule, adding insult to injury by having another bald man in the bed we used to share while I slept off a sixer of Miller High Life on the couch. I confronted him about it later and he used the classic “Stockard Channing Defense,” pointing out that there are worse things a person can do … than be a hypocrite. You can’t really argue with that.

But being single again is taking some getting used to, so I use liberal amounts of social lubricant to help me slide through the transition. It helps – and hinders. For instance, the other day I finally worked up enough liquid courage to ask out a bartender I’ve been crushing on, but because I had a surfeit of bravery I ended up asking him out again a few hours later. I don’t recall what he said either time, but I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea to ask again. Who knows? Maybe he’ll show up at my doorstep with roses. Some speech impediments are considered cute, so it’s entirely possible that he enjoys being slurred at.

While I work out the kinks of how to relate to people as a functional human being, I’m also working on my bod. I put on 30 pounds of savory breaded fat while I was in a relationship, and husky was just not a good look for me. Some people distribute extra weight sort of evenly, so that they end up with thick arms and asses. My extra weight concentrates itself on my torso, so when I pack on the pounds I look like a stick figure wearing a barrel. Not to add to the fat-shaming of a nation, but for me personally it didn’t work. Things got to the point where I didn’t even want to have sex with myself, though I did suck it up and power through somehow.

Thankfully, through the combined powers of proper diet, exercise and amphetamines, I’ve lost 20 pounds since May and I can practically fit into my summer wardrobe again without looking too much like something dead in a sausage casing. It should be a serious rule of life that a person can’t put on weight unless they can afford new clothes to accommodate the shift. In any case, I generally feel pretty good about myself now, though I still startle when I see my reflection unexpectedly.

Self-esteem after a breakup is tricky and cameras are bastards. A little while back, a so-called  “friend” of mine tagged a bunch of pictures of me on Facebook that really highlighted my chins, and it made me sad, so I dealt with it in a natural and healthy way by housing an entire pizza and two sides of blue cheese in one sitting. It was the perfect therapy.

You can rest assured that there is a happy ending in store for me, though, because now my emotional roller coaster is finally over. On that fateful night, I managed to eat all of my feelings.

Alejandro Morales is a writer and comedic performer who regularly hosts Camp Tabu.