The Oppressed Minority:

She had the kind of de-
meanour of delight in her self that endeared me to her but that all so reminded me, to my chagrin, of Johana. So I was suspicious of her motives. The self-satisfaction with which she absorbed the attention of these older men who inhabited the Smoker's Pit could have past for Johana's own narcissism and conceited cruelty: An attempt to draw in men only to de-
ceive them.
You might wonder why I apportioned an entire para-

graph to these details. In truth it is to avoid saying her name. Even letting on about Johana was excessive. I may edit her name to be a substitute by the time that you read this.

She certainly paid attention to me. I certainly must have had a demeanour of confidence about me, having stood up to Johana the prior day.
Hearing me speak of music and crack jokes locked me in the gaze of her attention to a degree that made me

apprehensive but no less cool.
At times I had even to apologise,
by virtue of personal compulsion if not insecurity, for sounding all too 'collegiate and dogmatic'.
An excess of knowledgeability can pass for pomp.

This dude was a gay dude. I used to know him. My only prayer now is that he does not read my blog. But per chance that sense of aggression symptomatic of having read my weblog was, in his case, simply symptomatic

of his Own arrogance and conceit. Johana would have deplored him for his lust for attention, a kind of self-consciousness so defensive that he could not tolerate my own views but so defensive that he could not help but to fend for my attention.
Though in fact I had never felt as though my attention mattered much to him, so much as an easy opportunity to infiltrate the collective

conversation by avenue of my influence.
Keep in mind that none of these gripes on my part have to do with his homosexuality. That comes later.

I wished that I could have told her that it was not homophobia that compelled me to disconfirm him. I was legitimately bored with his interjections. Even his most moving stories so privileged the individual subject of the narrative that

they left me wanting to hear some Universal theme. The collective theme unifying his stories seemed to be:
Pay attention to me! I am a minority. And I want to belong. If only I could have told him honestly:
There is NOTHING TO belong TO!

But she continued to gaze at me with those young Hispanic eyes with their judgemental lids. She was an ally and a friend

of his. And so when he tried to steal my attention he all so occupied hers. And by yielding to him, even as an other man (whose acquaintence I had gladly made for the first time that very day) vied for a stake in my conversation,
I surrendered not only the attention that I paid to that other man,
but all so to her, whose attention I promptly lost to this homosexual friend.
And what use did HE

have for that attention?
He did not admire her as I did. He only needed attention. It was not unlike what Ketchup had done with Johana...

I managed later, by virtue of a debater's memory, to pick up the conversation with the other gentle man again where we left off. But as I did so,
setting rules for what might offend me with endearing liberality,

admitting to my earlier conversational strides and building plot continuity,
I could not help but feel that some thing or an other had remained unsaid.
And that was the effect of having lost my audience:
Her. Why did I surrender it? Was it because I hate as much to be left out as he does, because I pride my self in being more Inclusive than Ketchup, who only pretended towards ega-

litarianism in order to gain power? Or is the worst of all possibilities true?: That I ceded the conversation to him,
pretending towards an interest that I did not feel, simply because of my Politically Correct Education? Again, I must remind you, as I would have loved to tell her,
that his homosexuality had little to do with my aversion. If there was some thing fundamentally

deplorable about him, his sexuality would have stemmed from that, along side his arrogance,
but even if the one were an effect of which the other was a cause,
only one of these had up-
set me. So why did I feel sorry for him?
Why should I feel guilty for promoting 'hetero-
normativity' and its exclusion of minorities?
Was I my self not a minority? And is all sexuality not suspect?

My greatest fear is that of fear its self. For if in fact I had yielded to his sense of entitlement out of fear, then that suggests that may be it was not for POWER that Ketchup had been so insufferable. But that same fear that for that moment I was guilty of.

No. For surely what truly swayed me were two-
fold: My own kindness. And those two Hispanic eyes.

[[[Dm.A.A.]]]