An ice cream truck just went by playing the theme from The Godfather. That is so wrong, yet so New Orleans.

For nearly two years I could not look at my Authors Guild bulletins at all, and would throw them in the trash as soon as they came. Now their headlines grow increasingly desperate (Spring 2009 issue: "Can This Industry be Saved?"; "The Future of Publishing"; "Keeping Calm in Changing Times" ... ), and I have to confess that I enjoy little thrills of schadenfreude as I flip through it. Not about the misfortunes of writers; I could never enjoy the fact that writers and books have fallen on hard times, but when I think of the incompetent 22-year-old assistant editors and publicists crying because they've lost their benefits package, I must admit I come a little more alive inside.

(From the "Along Publishers Row" column -- and please note that all the Guild's missing apostrophes are sic:

A cartoon by David Sipress in The New Yorker shows a smiling editor behind her desk. Across from her, an author looks shocked as the editor says, "We'd like to publish it, do nothing to promote it, and watch it disappear from the shelves in less than a month.")

Ah, kiddies, I am a bitter old publishing buzzard for sure.

Last night I had occasion to send "Enough Rope" to a gay couple from my OLGC rosary group. Rereading the essay, thinking about it and my other, somewhat less serious gender essay "Cocksucker Suit" (published in Greg Herren & Paul Willis' anthology Love, Bourbon Street), I came to a realization that I hadn't ever really admitted to myself before:

I like wearing dresses.

Mentally and emotionally I identify as male and always will, but the older I get, the more fluid my feelings on gender seem to become. It makes me happy that terms like "genderqueer" are used in casual online conversation. It makes me realize that when I put on a nice dress and shoes, fix my sacrum-length hair, and generally get all done up, it doesn't make me feel female; it just makes me feel sharp, the same way I feel when I wear my cockseersucker suit and Stacy Adams boys' alligator loafers. I don't wear much makeup, but I do like me some jewelry. Most of the time my style of dress resembles supergee's timeless description of his own fashion sense -- "garish and slovenly" -- but when I want to look nice, I don't care what gender my clothes are. I did for a while in 2004 and 2005, going through a phase where I wasn't at all comfortable wearing women's clothes or jewelry, but then in '05 there was this certain little event, and after that I found that I had bigger things to worry about than whether wearing a dress made me less manly. And everybody knows that most men in New Orleans, gay or straight, have at least one dress in their closet anyway.