Congressman Wrong on Gay Issues

The inaugural column

I woke up one morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, so instead I stared at the ceiling and simmered in my own existential dread. This isn’t something I do often, but every once in a while I like to dredge up all of my faults, demons, poor decisions, and indirection to ponder all at once. Not only does this get it out of the way for a while, but it has the added benefit of humbling my erection, thus keeping me out of trouble for entire hours at a time.

On this particular morning, however, I was in an even nastier rut than usual. After all, there I was: back living in my old college town of Oxford, Ohio after an epic eight month cross-country road trip that left me dead broke, exhausted, and with enough illegitimate children to start my own high school basketball team in about fifteen years. Despite being nine months a college graduate, I was completely without prospects. In the time it takes a spermatozoa and an egg to gestate into a living, breathing human being, I had accomplished the equivalent of an evening’s worth of emotional, intellectual, and financial growth. It’s as if instead of holding a college degree for nearly a year, I had worked a single night shift at Hardee’s during which I read an issue of People magazine and flirted with the fry girl.

Then I thought of something that cheered me up: I would write a column. On a website. My website.

For those of you who don’t know, back in my heyday I wrote for the campus newspaper at Miami University. During my tenure, first as a columnist and then as an editor, I managed to garner a bit of a reputation around town, mostly because I wrote that I would never have sex with Ann Coulter (yeah, I still don’t understand how that could be controversial, seeing as how her private parts undoubtedly smell of sulfur and brimstone). The problem began locally and spread when the right-wing website The Free Republic picked up the column—this being the same organization that so bravely rallied the boycott against the Dixie Chicks back in 2003 and began the mindless, orgiastic stupidaf**k that followed.

After that whole adventure I picked up a bit of cult following, as evidenced by the large amounts of hate mail I got at the newspaper and the one time a professor informed me that he found graffiti on a desk in his classroom that said, and this is completely true, “Steve Markley takes it up the ass.” (Wow, now that re-read that last sentence, I really regret the order I phrased that).

I miss it, though. Since graduating, my mind has bombarded itself with ideas—stuff I would have written in my next column (and yes, the world is a lesser place for me having missed the whole Mark Foley thing). So here is the solution: an inaugural column to set up what will hopefully be many more to come here at stephenmarkley.com. Feel free to wander the rest of the sight and marvel at how little html code I’ve learned in the last month since dreaming up this scheme. The primary thrust, of course, will be this delightful little column, which will appear every Friday afternoon for the next four weeks and every other Friday after that.

The topics will range from politics to world events to popular culture to sports and all will likely include poop jokes because they’re easy and I’m unoriginal. Over time, I plan to make further additions to the website, including excerpts from my travel memoir as well as my first novel.

Now that I’ve christened the column (I couldn’t find a bottle of champagne so I broke a 40 oz. Viper malt liquor on my kitchen floor, luckily realizing my mistake in time to soak up the precious liquid with a sponge and squeeze it into my mouth), let me lay down a few quick ground rules.

First of all, you might have noticed earlier in the column that I used asterisks to trick you into thinking I did not use the word “fu**”. See? You still can’t figure out what I said. The American puritan ethic necessitates that printed media disguise its naughty language so that kids won’t have abortions and shoot up their schools, and I will respect that fine tradition on this page mostly because I think it’s hilarious.

Secondly, now that I have complete creative control with no editors to make me remove hilarious words like “swamp-sac” and “cocaine,” I will grace you with much better titles. When I wrote for a real newspaper, I was constantly forced to use awful titles because of space constraints and silly grammatical rules. Thus a column about a homophobic congressman would have some absurd title like: “Congressman wrong on gay issues,” which of course sounds like a snippet of conversation overheard at a fraternity pledge party:

“Bro, you know those issues about a person’s right to have his or her love acknowledged by the government and live a lifestyle unhindered by the rest of the population’s own moral shortcomings? That’s like sooo gay.”

“Totally gay, bro, totally gay issues… What do they want us to do to this puppy?”

Finally, I would like to put to bed right now, the rumors that I have a blog. This is not a blog. When you type the address into your computer, you are not typing in www.blogspot.com/markleyblog/blogjuice/bloggerator3000. “Blog” sounds like something you find in a bedpan at a nursing home. I’m not a blogger, I’m a qualified commentator because I watch at least half an hour of Fox News every day.

So there it is. I did it. I made one joke about politics and one about poop. When do I get to be famous?