NO BOYS ALLOWED!!!

Caption originally created on January 17, 2015

This one has a bit of a story to it, so I’ll try to be as brief as possible.

Back in June of 2012, I had the opportunity to attend a reunion of people who were members of a high school marching band that I was once a member of. While I was there, I had a chance to re-connect with one of my old bandmates - for the sake of preserving his privacy, I’ll refer to him here as “Brent Rogers.”  We did all of the usual reunion-type stuff - talk about old times, catch up to personal news, etc.  We even posed for a photo for old times sake; said photo was posted to my Facebook page when I got home.

Fast-forward to December 2014, when I took time to visit with my family in Georgia for the Christmas holidays.  And, just my luck - no sooner do I arrive, then I catch a cold!  As a result, I spent my entire visit convalescing.  About a day after my arrival, my Dad volunteered to take me to a local drug store to get some medicine to help fight my illness, and after we returned home, he asked me about the photo that I had taken with “Brent Rogers” at the band reunion in 2012.  When I explained that there really wasn’t much to tell - it was the first time we had seen each other since the early 80s and that “Brent” was one of those kids that he already knew about - Dad explained that “people were wanting to know” if I was using the photo to come out of the closet as gay.  (As it turned out, “people” weren’t wanting to know anything; this is just my Dad’s way of badgering me on a subject that he already knows the answer to.)  I countered by saying that he knew as well as “people” did that I’ve never been gay, and have always had romantic interests in women - then rather pointedly asked where “people” get off on asking what “they” know to be a counter-intuitive question. My Dad responded by saying, “But you don’t date many women!”  My counter-response, essentially, was this: “And that’s proof of gayness?!?”

When it comes to his oldest offspring, my Dad is an IDIOT.

The following January, I decided to take another stab at captioning using the Microsoft Paint program; this encounter was heavily on my mind when I captioned this one, along with “Beautiful World,” on the 17th.  The quotation is all original; no borrowed quotes this time!  It is also, perhaps, my most personal caption, as it gets to the core of how I’ve always known myself to be.