Rim Shots: Someday...

aspiration \,as-p-'r-shn\

1 ( usu. aspirations ) a hope or ambition of achieving something : he had nothing tangible to back up his literary aspirations | the yawning gulf between aspiration and reality.

• the object of such an ambition; a goal : fabrics and oriental rugs were my aspirations.

2 the action of pronouncing a sound with an exhalation of breath.

3 Medicine the action of drawing fluid by suction from a vessel or cavity.

DERIVATIVES

aspirational adjective (in sense 1) .

ORIGIN late Middle English (sense 2) : from Latin aspiratio(n-), from the verb aspirare (see aspire ).

I'm going to be an actor. Someday. I'm going to be a Doctor. Someday. I'm going to be good looking. Someday! Well I'm planning to open my own club. Someday.

I find it very telling that as I sit in a gay club or bar I get to hear all these fantastic plans for the future being spewed out as easily as the breath that carries them. Problem is that some of them, actually the overwhelmingly vast majority of them, will never come to fruition. Hell, they never even make it out of the gate.

What's troubling to me is not the fact so many dreams of my fellow man go un-pursued. That has been the way of things ever since the beginning of time. But rather, in the gay community it seems these stories, or the telling of them, have morphed into some perverted form of alternate reality. What's really disturbing is that it has become so much the norm. Actual dreams and aspirations have been displaced by fantasy. And everyone is okay with it that way.

Where would we be if the Wright brothers never actually pursued their dream of building a flying machine? I bet we would all be a lot skinnier than we are now. We would all have to walk to Hollywood for that acting interview. And we couldn't have that now, could we?

What about the guy that invented fake tits? Can you imagine a world full of flat-chested drag queens?

Or how about Doc Johnson's dildos? How many of us would never have had that first back-door experience, or suffered God knows how many lonely nights with nothing but the same old sock if the Doctor never followed up his dream of creating a realistic artificial dick? But he pursued his dream much to the embarrassment of his teenaged son whose manhood has been immortalized in silicon. (I don't think he has any reservations though because they are both, like really rich now.)

I don't find myself worried about the future. I am worried about the lack of one. I am worried that all too many of our young gay men and women are okay with that retail job in the mall. "I'm only doing this until my agent gets me an audition. I let him fuck me the other day and he said I was really good. And if I let him teach and coach me some more I will get an acting job in no time!"