I’ve never understood TMI.  How could there possibly be Too Much Information about anything?  (If the subject is dull, then it would be TMBI: Too Much Boring Information, and that makes sense to me.) But people who exclaim TMI! are usually expressing embarrassment and discomfort. I love feeling embarrassed and uncomfortable.  Especially when those feelings result from detailed intimacies.  One thing I KNOW is true about the TRUTH—it’s always SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than the pretense that covers it up. Truth has a deep, expansive root system anchored to EXPERIENCE while pretense (or THE LIE) is just kind of propped up on its stumpy little end and can topple over quite easily.

American history (I’ll leave the rest of the world for somebody else to bitch about) is jam-packed with stories of folks who grew up believing that an aunt or a grandmother or a sister was actually their mother.  It’s full of stories about parents, siblings, neighbors, priests, who molested and abused children and then, on the surface, behaved as if everything was just fine. (The pope knew children were being abused by American priests, and that it was widespread.  He admitted that publicly.  But to bring it up in our American dialogue?  It’s considered a FAR-left-wing OPINION, though it’s a FACT, and facts are now facing extinction.) We all see long marriages where the behavior clearly reveals contempt or disinterest just beneath the surface.  My mom used to say “There are none so blind as those who will not see” but it took me a few years before I got that she was quoting.

Why do we cling to THE SURFACE?  What is it about the surface that fascinates and seduces us into staying there?  Why don’t our instincts lead us TO WANT TO KNOW the truth of our lives and of those we love?  To strap on a pair of goggles and dive down as deep as we can with our lungs full of fresh, myth-busting air?  Be patient with me if you can (if not, bail now), I’m just following a thread that’s really tugged hard in me as far back as I can remember. 

Of course my homosexuality created my intolerance for self-deceit, as I hated being in the closet. At age five I was very excited indeed by some shirtless actors bathing in a river on Wagon Train, a TV western my dad and I watched together circa 1962.  I knew on instinct to keep my kindergarten-sized arousal a secret.  In high school, I was beating off like a madman to pictures of Mark Spitz in Life Magazine in his tiny (for the 70’s) swimsuit, and then taking Patty Plude out for a date later that night.  She never even seemed to wonder why I didn’t ever try to kiss her. 

Sometime later I started fucking a new girl in my parent’s car, (she seduced me pretty aggressively for a 17-year old female virgin in 1973; she must have had the POV I was hot in my closeted clueless way) and she quickly became a slave to the thick eight and one half inches I was lucky enough to inherit from my Italian Papa Vittorio and never had a clue until 10 years later when I came out in NYC that it was a gift from heaven in a gay community of men for god sake!  I started developing a frame of reference.  (Women, I know you are all too aware of how cruel men can be if you don’t have the right sized, or right-shaped body part of their choosing.  It has nothing to do with being gay. Let me know you hear it girls!)  Anyway, my first-place finish in the penis-sweepstakes was an amazing karmic gift I somehow managed to receive as compensation for the truly rotten disadvantage of growing up gay in America.

(By the way, this is not anything close to the “stunning revelation” I promised I would share at some point.  This is just a little inappropriate tidbit of fleshy truth designed to delight or disgust you, depending on your inclination).  I came to understand in my gut that Sue Naked In Person would never have the zinging knockout punch of even a photo of JFK Jr.  The deception I perpetrated on everyone (everyone who was flat-out blind anyway) was reflex.  I was partly honest with only myself, rationalizing that I was just in my “homosexual phase” which was (and may still be) a popular, soul-crushingly destructive American myth for young kids who are gay, perpetrated by heterosexual adults who don’t want to face up to the truth about their adolescent kids’ obvious homo tendencies.  (“It’s just a phase, all boys go through it—it’ll pass!”) I couldn’t face the feelings that a look at the truth would bring to the surface, so I continued on my path of self-imposed incarceration and torture, involving a few more terrific, smart, sexy women.  The ladies loved me.

At 26, living in NYC, I reasoned that “the phase” had gone on long enough, and that sucking cock might be more fun than pretending not to want to, so I came out, fell in love with a sweetheart named Kevin, and started becoming really curious about why my acting sucked so bad.  (Could it have had something to do with the fact that I had been repressing my very LIFE FORCE? I was the star of anything I wanted to be at NU, and had had lots of parts in NYC in my early 20s, (in small venues of course) and my acting was false and utterly self-conscious.  I had very little impulse to be in denial about this.  Instead, I was eager to fix it.

But back to The Surface and it’s properties.  Here’s what I found in the online thesaurus: 

 Surface: The extended two-dimensional outer boundary of a three-dimensional object.  A superficial aspect as opposed to the real nature of something; "It was not what it appeared to be on the surface."  Information that has become public; "All the reports were out in the open, the facts had been brought to the surface." 

So the immutable properties of The Surface are inextricably linked with deception and secrecy.  Interesting.  I’ve never liked mystery novels, but isn’t the kick for readers who love them that at the end the truth is finally revealed?  Will we allow ourselves only to get down to the bottom of the well and feel what IS as we approach death? Whether we want to or not?  Will the truth come bursting through the surface for all of us like it did when the Alien burst through the thin flesh wall of John Hurt’s heaving stomach?  I keep coming back to Act III of Our Town, which is still the best-ever American play. 

If you’re an artist, cultivate your impatience with The Surface.  (If you don't, your punishment will be built-in: you'll languish there forever.) If you feel timid about looking below, don’t ponder your fear too long, just take a deep breath and then seize any handy sharp object of your choosing and slash that thin (or stubbornly thick) membrane of surface nonsense.  Puncture it, tear it open, tear it off.  Good stuff awaits you underneath.  “Good” meaning real, honest, scary, adrenaline-pumping, uncontrolled, unrehearsed, authentic stuff.  Go for it.  (Or consider accounting.  Trust me, the world does not need timid artists.)  

Life is NOT too short, as we always hear, it’s too much lived on the surface for too long.