This piece was a left-over fragment from: Eve4yone Eat2 a Peck 0f Dirt Before They Die… although I ended up not using it, as it got to the point that I thought it wound up being just a bit too much, when it was put within that particular framework—it basically felt like I was overstating the point I was trying to make. Hence, I decided at the time that it was likely better to rewrite and reframe it to stand on its own.

The earliest seed of inspiration comes from nothing more and nothing less than the old slang cliché of referring to adolescent boys (especially if they are athletic, physically-fit jocks – i.e. prime specimen “alpha males”), as “young bucks”.

That imagery—of the puberty-addled alpha males that I went to school with (basically the jocks and/or bullies – they were often interchangeable), acting just like bucks in rut, fighting over mating rights, is pretty accurate, when one thinks of it. All of it: from the bugling challenge-shouts, the antler clashes, and bodily waste scent-marking - it all fits. Because, after all, how similar in purpose, is a deer enthusiastically spraying piss all over its undercarriage, to every single strategically-unflushed and sickeningly-fragrant toilet that one sees in a High School locker room? And, let’s face it: macho men don’t really forget to flush the toilet. What they’re really doing is marking their territory.

Likewise, the piece also gets back to the now-familiar themes of all the times during school that I (as a designated omega), got called a ‘faggot’ (and got the shit kicked out of me for that privilege), generally by jocks that were blissfully unaware of just how homoerotic many of their own, customary behaviours actually were.

Of course, that bitter observation that the biggest homophobes often have the deepest and darkest closets does exist for a reason. Still, knowing some twenty-plus years after the fact, just how many of those douchebags who never tired of giving me a daily ration of shit subsequently came out of the closet in their twenties and thirties, didn’t really bring much of a sense of vindication, much less any sort of satisfaction—justice delayed is justice denied, and all of that. But of course, if I’m still being brutally honest, we all know that Justice is just a fancy word for revenge, or as Joni Mitchell sang: it’s just ice.

There are a few further bits of bitter observation, and a few cultural references sprinkled throughout the piece, but I will leave it for the reader to suss them out on their own from this point forward…