Hello! Here’s a couple photos that my friend Anthony DeAngelis took of me, to be used in promoting my book.

And I should mention that I’ve recently come out of the closet about some semi-nude photos of me by cult filmmaker Bruce LaBruce.

This happened many years ago in Pittsburgh, and the photos initially popped up in an issue of this snooty gay French magazine. I used to be a little embarrassed by them, but I’m not now. And now LaBruce put one of them on the cover of his new monograph. Click here to see it, I’m in there somewhere…

Geez! Kinda cool and kinda weird.

My life has changed completely in the last four months, and one of the more minor changes was that I got a new phone that takes pictures. Here are some that I’ve taken during this period (some are very NSFW so I’m posting them after the jump).

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I got a job at a porn store and I’ve been capturing some of the funniest and weirdest shit I’ve seen there.

This was the initial contender for “Best Title in the Store.”

However it was soon bested by this, one of a series of (for some reason) cereal-centric titles.

The Myley Cyrus blow-up doll: so wrong, so right, or a little bit of both?

The producers of this DVD highly recommend their own DVD. That’s encouraging, right?

The hands-down winner for Worst DVD Cover in the Store. Click to enlarge (if you must) and note the little man rappelling off the cavernous anus. Art directors of this shit must just get bored and do whatever the fuck they want.

I took this next one to amuse a coworker. It’s my big black cock.

Here are some photos just from everyday life.

I did not take anyone by the hand and make love to them in this Chevy Van, but it was so awesome looking I had to snap a pic.

Sign you’re spending too much time on the Internet: you look at a water fountain and think that you can subscribe to its RSS feed (lower left corner).

I saw this sign at a McDonald’s and it made me cry, both for personal reasons and because it’s inherently (and somewhat inexplicably) depressing.

On the other hand, this pastel expressionistic rendering of NSync made me smile when I saw it at a Goodwill.

Target sells happiness. We’re all going to die.

When I saw this in the supermarket I thought, “How disgusting/excessive/unhealthy.” And then a few days later I ate the other brand of frozen pizza I’d purchased and had cookies for dessert.

Finally, this is the last photo taken of my cat Gus, aka Augustus McCrae Soltesz, aka My Special Man. This was minutes before the vet came to my house to put him to sleep. It’s a hard photo for me to look at because you can see in his eyes that he’s troubled, he could barely breathe at this point. I miss him so much, and in some ways it’s like it hasn’t sunk in yet. After I put him to sleep I buried him in the woods outside my old hometown. It was hard work but the soil was rich and dark, I felt like I was planting him. All I know is that I gave him a good life.

Today I thought this guy was totally cruising me from across the lobby at my allergy clinic but then I realized it was the cover of this magazine.

Rising sea levels could swamp sections of the Eastern Shore, eat away islands in the Chesapeake Bay and submerge long stretches of Atlantic Ocean beaches by 2100…[more]

Ocean City, Maryland is but a sliver of sand – the place already feels like it’s hanging on by a thread. Being there recently, in the dead of winter, I couldn’t get it out of my head that it is doomed. I was imagining it as a lost, submerged world when I took these pictures.

A bit dramatic, I know…

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I have in fact been inside the actual closed down hospital, though I didn’t know it at the time. Torrance is still an operational facility on the same grounds as the abandoned one, and I volunteered there for two years when I was in high school. One day they sent me to find some archived paperwork in the old hospital (they use it as storage). They left me alone in that place, all echoing hallways and endless rooms, and I’ll never forget it.

Looking at these, I’m kinda bummed I didn’t get any good shots of the exterior. It’s three interconnected buildings and a basement floor that runs the entire length of the property. The middle building has a second floor that is basically inaccessible due to a broken staircase and that’s it’s falling the fuck apart.

Though I’ve never been in them, there are underground tunnels that connect all of the buildings old and new. These may have been built to use for natural disasters or as a fallout shelter. I’ve heard apocryphal stories of patients getting lost and dying in them.

Michael Kirwan’s got way too much great stuff on his site to include here.  In addition to his illustrations (check out this one, too: The Frat Boys Hurricane Party), he does great illustrated fiction. Some of my favorites:  Beginner’s Luck (part of a series), Jeremy’s Visit, The Spare Room, and Thugs ‘N’ Ho’s, Inc., from which I particularly enjoy this passage:

My body adjusted to the piercing intrusion after about fifteen minutes so I went limp and clutched my broken sphincter around the barrel girth of Louie’s tool a few times.

“Can you take it now?” he whispered behind my ear.

“Yeah. I gotcha.” I croaked. It was a manly exchange, not faggy in any way.