• efgumnick
      • hello Edward Gumnick
      • Username: efgumnick
      • In response to: "Who are you?" I’m a writer in Houston, Texas. My mission in life is to spend all day talking to interesting people, writing stuff, drinking coffee, and passing lazy hours in sunny piazze.
  • efgumnick's latest answers
    • Dear Ed

      • My Swollen Knee

        Don’t take things so seriously. There’s almost no decision that you’ll make about which I can’t change my mind later.

        Rethink the conservative religious college. Yeah, it will be great to spend a semester in Europe, but you’ll do it at the cost of prolonging my closeted misery for at least a few more years.

        Get out of your head once in a while. You don’t have the whole world in there, no matter what you think. Get acquainted with your body while it’s young, strong, and flexible. I’m going to be sorry later that you didn’t.

        Girls—they’re always going to be your best friends, but give up on trying to find the one who’ll make you straight. Never gonna happen, and you’ll make a whole lot of them miserable along the way.

        Why am I dancing around this? Come out. Soon, maybe right now. You’re surrounded by people who love you, people you can trust. Tell one of them the truth about yourself, and then get on with living my real life.

      • answered by efgumnick on 08/19/2010
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    • Road-trip Mix

      • Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones

        Perfect for singing at the top of your lungs, and the least talented people in the car can still sing the “Whoo-whooooo!” parts.

        American Pie by Don McLean

        Everyone over the age of 35 knows all the lyrics. Sing along until you’re completely breathless!

        Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano

        I once drove 300 miles to the beach with eight friends piled into my ’76 Chevy Impala, and someone decided that every time we passed traffic cones, we had to sing “Feliz Navidad.”

        We were college students. It didn’t have to make sense.

      • answered by efgumnick on 08/14/2010
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    • It’s All About the @#$%ing Context

      • Big open bear mouth

        My parents enforced very strict rules about swear words. We weren’t allowed to use anything as strong as “hell,” and my siblings and I took these prohibitions so seriously that I was reluctant to say the word even in the context of Sunday-school classes. My parents are generally liberal, but they take their Catholic faith very seriously, and they also brought us up with a strong belief that words matter. We weren’t allowed to say any of the commonplace four-letter words, and we were also forbidden to say “I hate you” to one another, or to use the word “hate” in any connection with another human being.

        Somewhere in my public-school education, I picked up the idea that only dorks talk like Sunday-school teachers, so I started decorating my playground rhetoric with just enough blue language to fit in. But I never felt at ease using profanity, which was probably for the best. Allowing swear words to slip through the filter only selectively at school kept me from accidentally dropping any f-bombs at home.

        When I left home for the first time, it was to begin school at a conservative Catholic university. There I met fellow students whose home environments and personal habits made mine seem libertine. I had to set up new filters to segregate the language of my drinking buddies from the language of my charismatic friends.

        After school, I moved to a new city and took a job as a typesetter at a magazine publishing company, where my boss was a woman who swore like a sailor. “Dickhead” was her favorite term of endearment, and she used the word “fuck” with astonishing ease. It helped that we worked the second shift; we came to work at 3:30 p.m., and by 5:30, all of the executives and most of the designers and editors would clear out. For the rest of the shift, we’d have the building all to ourselves. We considered ourselves the workhorse shift, and as we cleaned up the botched jobs and unfinished projects left by the early shift, profane rants and tirades were standing operating procedure.

        When I left that job, I was surprised to find that the old filters were still in place. I’ve never once called a co-worker or boss a dickhead, not even with affection. And I follow this rule of thumb: if you can picture myself sharing a drink with someone, it’s probably okay to make judicious use of the occasional four-letter word. But words still matter, so if I’m in any doubt, I try to limit myself to language that I wouldn’t mind using in front of my parents.

      • answered by efgumnick on 08/14/2010
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    • Home and Home Again

      • Since we’re talking about dreams, I won't limit myself to one home.


        Herb Garden Chamomile, Herb Garden, Huntington Library

        There’s my home away from the city, my retreat from the noise, heat, and pollution. It’s on the outskirts of a tiny Italian village whose name you’d recognize as an inexpensive red wine. The main structure is an updated farm house. “Updated,” that is, to pipe in water and electricity some time in the last century, but otherwise rustic. Still, it’s simple and clean. Two women who live in the village keep it neat and take care of it when I’m in the city. One of their young sons is constantly at work fixing whatever is threatening to fall apart next.

        The house sits on the edge of a few acres of grape vines. One of my neighbors maintains the vines. I take part in the harvest every year, but he handles the rest and keeps my cellar stocked with the finished wine. The kitchen garden is my territory. I grow flowers, herbs, and a few American vegetable varieties that they don’t stock in the local markets. Getting the first seeds through the Italian bureaucracy took a lot of work, so now I harvest my own seeds each fall.

        When I’m there, my country house is always full of people—old friends from the U.S., newer ones who drive out in tiny, fast cars or take the train from the city. They can’t resist my offer of free lodging, flowing wine, and a dinner table that I’ve tried to make legendary. I’ve begun making friends with a few people who live in the village, too.

        At the end of each long, languid weekend, I walk to the station and take the train back to the city. From the train to the subway—just three quick stops and a four-block walk. I stop for bread and cheese to go with the bottle of wine in my backpack and almost as an afterthought, a handful of flowers. Then through the forest-green door marked with “28” in tarnished brass figures, up four flights of stairs to our small, cool, dark cave of an apartment. I wrestle the door open, and he is there at the desk working. I drop my bags on the battered oak table we bought in the flea market at the Porta Portese. He takes off his glasses as a matter of habit, and as I look at his eyes—the first thing I noticed, and the last thing I hope to ever see—I am home again.

      • answered by efgumnick on 08/13/2010
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    • On the Death Penalty

      • Jail Cell

        I say no. Our system of justice relies on human beings, and human beings sometimes make mistakes. You can’t do much by way of retraction after you’ve stolen the life of an innocent man.

        I also believe in redemption. Maybe it doesn’t come to everyone, and maybe there are people so evil that they can’t be redeemed even a little bit. But every human being deserves at least the chance to change, to become something better.

      • answered by efgumnick on 07/29/2010
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