The Migrating Fag, four years later

This weekend marks the four year anniversary of my trek from Texas to Illinois. A lot of people ask me what brought me here, and I honestly don't know the exact answer to that question. I was extremely comfortable there with a great job, a lot of quality friends, a long bed truck, and a bartender fuck buddy in every gay bar. I guess I'm the type of person who never stays in one place for a long time. Another reason for my need to see new places was because I was having coffee with a group of friends (about eight or nine of them) and I realized that I had sex with everyone sitting at the table. When you've seen that many penises, it's time to jet.

I packed everything into a U-Haul trailer and was sad to know that every one of my possessions fit into that little thing. I drove north with the theme from "Perfect Strangers" playing in my head, and I felt like an adult for the first time in my life. There'd be no family to help me, no comfortable job, no spacious apartment, and no safety net of any kind in Chicago. I'd also have to find all new friends.

Independence would have to wait just a bit longer. I didn't make it out of Texas on my own. Once I hit Texarkana, the transmission on my truck gave out and I was stranded. I called my sister and she couldn't do anything to help me, so I decided to stay in a motel for the night. Then there was a knock at my door at 4 A.M.. It was my mother and stepfather, who had come to hitch my trailer and my pathetic ass the rest of the way to Illinois. My sister called her and explained the situation and my mama came rushing in to save me. This was odd because I'd completely written them out of my life for saying such harsh things to me about being gay and moving away so quickly.

The thing that I learned from that experience was that no matter how much planning and preparing you do, things will seldom go the way you think they'll go. I thought I had all the answers. I looked at everything with a scientific point of view. Here are the controls, there are the variables, and these are the possible outcomes. I never accounted for the unpredictability of nature and the love of a crazy religious mother.