Yesterday, driving from Baltimore to New York with my dear friend Martin, I stopped for gas at a Sunoco station. While I pumped, Martin went inside to get us drinks; I requested chocolate milk, but he emerged after a few moments to report a tragic lack of chocolate milk on the premises. Upon reflection, I don’t even know why I asked for chocolate milk. It is yummy but would (1) not do much to quench my thirst, and (2) spend a lifetime on the hips. Perhaps the God of Reduced Body Fat had arranged for the leche chocolate shortage, but I whirled around and spat in His (or Her) eye by going inside and getting carb- and sugar-laden orange juice, when I had already had orange juice with breakfast.

The cashier was a burly and disheveled grease monkey with a deeply gruff speaking voice. “That all?” he demanded of me and Martin as we put our drinks on the counter.

“Yes,” we said.

He squinted at us. “You sure?”

“Yes,” we said.

This manly fellow rang us up and returned to what he was doing when we had entered: coloring in, with felt-tip markers, a line drawing of a pretty butterfly fluttering over a field of flowers. Awaiting its turn to the side was a drawing of a girl wearing a bonnet and carrying a basket.

He seemed proud of his work.

Last night, I went with Faustus and his boyfriend, E.S., to see a very powerful film called The Mudge Boy. It’s the coming-of-age story of an awkward (and adorable) farm boy who copes with the recent death of his mother by secretly wearing her fur coat and carrying her pet chicken around wherever he goes. It would not be giving too much away to reveal that he falls in love with a handsome, slightly older neighbor, who protects him from ridicule by the local band of ne’er-do-wells. Various antics ensue, but the theme of the movie is that the people in the boy’s life encourage him to murder the best and most endearing part of himself in order to fit in with the masculine expectations society places on him.

All I could think of later was that I was glad nobody had done that to the gas station cashier.