Tuesday, July 28, 2015

summer forever

Another weekend of partying too hard, of enjoying what it is to be alive and in warm weather. Another summer weekend. It all blurred together, one big party that stretched from Friday evening to Sunday evening, paused only briefly each night for a few hours of sleep. Friday night involved one of the sexiest moments in recent memory, a threesome with a friend and this real-life Tarzan. That night blurred well into Saturday. I woke up, did some work, drank some wine to ease the hangover, and soon it was time for more partying, more fun. Fell asleep around 7, got two hours of sleep, then went to meet a good friend from college to head to the beach. At Riis Beach, there was drinking, swimming, talking, and looking at boys. It was a beautiful day, a beautiful weekend.

I flirted with this boy sitting with us and we exchanged looks on the bus ride home, exchanged info. Summer forever! I shouted this at least once on the beach. Probably a few times. There is no time like this in New York, no time where there is more fun to be had, more beauty to interact with, more life to live. May it last forever!

Friday, July 24, 2015

Disclosure - "Bang That"

Last night, I learned that the writer and I actually did not have chemistry. Yes, I wanted us to because he’s so fucking sexy and cool, but you either click or you don’t. You either stay up til 3 in the morning, laughing easily, polishing off two bottles of wine, smoking outside your window, and talking all night, or you don’t.

And last night, clicking with someone else allowed me to see this, allowed me to just how little clicking was happening with the writer. Around midnight, I was texted out of the blue by this guy that I had hit on months ago on Scruff, this guy that I had tried many times to get to hang out with me. He said he wanted to make out.

He came over. We fooled around. It was easy, natural. Touching him didn’t feel awkward. There was no thinking behind the act, no trying to know what should be done. It was just doing what felt right. After, we sat in my bed and drank glass after glass after glass of wine, just talking, getting to know each other, and laughing a lot. We had the same sense of humor and it was all just so incredibly easy, the conversation. It threw into stark relief just how much effort had been required with the writer to try to get the conversation even somewhat close to this natural flow. Being with this guy allowed to feel much better about it not working out with the writer. I had been a bit bummed about it, thought I had somehow fumbled the ball. I had wanted to make this person my boyfriend so bad just because he was sexy and cool, and was all too willing to overlook our lack of chemistry. It was some gift that this person texted me last night and allowed to put all of this in perspective.

We talked for hours, drank all the wine in my house. We went to bed around three. He spent the night and we cuddled. This morning, I kept setting my alarm for later and later, wanting to lie in bed with him for as long as possible. We walked out together, still joking, still laughing.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

oil and water

We were making out on his couch. I had lifted up his shirt, kissed his chest. I unbuttoned his pants. I kissed him some more. And then I stopped. I put my shoes on, told him that I had to go. “Oil and water,” I may have said. I was out the door insanely fast and heard him mutter a slightly confused, “See you around.”

And with that, my dreams of a romance with this beautiful man that I have hung out with a few times came to an end.

Once back home, in my bed, I wondered how that had gone so wrong wrong, how that date had gone downhill so quickly, wondered if we had some different day instead whether things would have played out differently. I replayed the events, the things said.

I met him at a nearby restaurant last night where he was eating dinner and had a beer with him while he finished his meal. The conversation was slightly awkward, filled with occasional silences that stretched for a couple beats too long. I told him I had finished his book, that I liked it, but that one of the characters was really offensive. That was where things definitely started to take a turn. He said he didn’t want to talk about it. We talked about other things. We talked about Vegas, about Martha’s Vineyard.

We walked back to his house, sat at his kitchen table, drank whiskeys on the rocks, talked about Stephen King and Raymond Carver. The conversation had finally picked up steam and gained a natural energy. He’s beautiful. I kept looking at his green eyes, his big black pupils. He joked about the awkwardness earlier, said we’re kind of like oil and water. I agreed and asked why that was. Neither of us had an answer for why we had a hard time clicking, both of us liking each other, and yet the important thing, some natural chemistry missing. He said with a smile that we’re not going to be life partners. I laughed and said Nope. Given that the conversation was about how nothing was probably going to come out of the two of us hanging out, it was all incredibly jovial and friendly.

Later, when we cuddled on his couch and started to make out, I couldn’t get into it. As sexy as this person, as smart as he is, knowing that what I wanted, a romance, wasn’t going to happen with this guy, I couldn’t continue to kiss him. Sparks weren’t there. Water had been poured all over the matches.

Walking out his door, down his stairs, out his front door, down the block, I kept wondering if it wasn’t too late to turn around, to go back and have sex with him and just enjoy the situation for whatever it was. I didn’t. I had left. Things would be impossibly awkward now. Everything just happened so quickly, so wrongly. I fucked up again and again. I kicked myself the whole way home, wondering why it is that I’m so awkward all the time, why it is I lack the natural social skills of banter that most other human beings seem to have effortlessly. But it is what it is. You can’t force things. The connection is either there or it’s not. And it makes zero sense often why or why it’s not there. On paper, I should be crazy about this person - tall, beautiful, smart, funny, successful - and yet when I was with him I would sometimes have trouble talking to him. When I was with him, I didn’t have the overwhelming desire to rip off his clothes. I just wanted to sit at his kitchen table and drink with him and talk about writers and drugs and life.

He has beautiful hands. I thought of them in bed as I looked at Grindr, briefly wanting something to fill this void I felt, someone to validate me, to make me temporarily forget my self-loathing. What I wanted though wasn’t there. I am not going to find it in pictures of spread assholes and Sups. What I wanted, what I want still, is connection.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Vegas, baby! Vegas!

I spent this past weekend in Vegas. It is now Tuesday afternoon and I am just starting to feel recovered, just starting to feel like I again have a fully functioning brain, not fried by sun, booze, and lack of sleep. I arrived back in New York around 6 A.M. on a redeye that I barely slept on, took a quick two hour nap at home, and then shuffled through my workday, counting down the hours and minutes until I could go home and get some sleep.

We flew out on Friday morning, had lunch at Lotus of Siam, and then discovered that the same random strip mall off the Strip housing this Thai restaurant also had a couple gay bars, a transsexual bar, and a couple of gay bathhouses. We did a bar crawl through them and the partying never really stopped from that point for the next three days save for a few hours of sleep each night. 

The whole purpose of the trip had been to see Mariah Carey perform, which we did and which was amazing. Really, really good. The peak of the concert for me was when she performed “We Belong Together.” I had forgotten what an amazing song it was and how important a role it played in my life during various heartbroken moments, moments when I thought the same thoughts as the song, singing the chorus as loud as I could, imagining that if only this person could understand, that it was so clear we belonged together, that we, that I, could be happy. And so all of those moments, of anguish, heartbreak, and lovesickness, they came all washing back over me in this theater at Caeser’s Palace. I was deep in my feelings and Mariah’s voice was the vehicle carrying me, zooming from place to place, feeling to feeling, memory to memory.

From there, we continued our tour of the dive bars of Vegas, hitting up Charlie’s, from which I was 86’d - the first time in my life I have ever been officially 86’d from a bar. The bouncer barged into the bathroom stall I was in, caught me sniffing something, started yelling at me, and chased me out of the bar. From there, we went to another divey gay bar in another random strip mall, before heading to the transexual bar, before heading to the bathhouse. It was a night spent hurtling along the edges of Vegas, exploring all of these fun places. At some point in the early morning, we left the bathhouse and headed back to the hotel.

A few hours of sleep later, we had to check out. We spent the day at a gay pool party, lounging in chairs, and looking at attractive men in cute swimwear until it was time for our flight to take off.

I played a lot of roulette while in Vegas, too much. The trick is knowing when to walk away. It’s a life lesson and yes, it cost me a few hundred dollars to learn the lesson, and whether or not it will stick is another matter entirely. The lesson is this: Leave the table when you are ahead. Know that winning doesn’t last forever. Leave while there are still chips in front of you. It’s all a matter of intuition, timing, and suppressing the voice in your head that says to keep going, that the good times will last forever. It won’t. Move tables. Walk away.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Baltimore Vows

I spent this past weekend in Baltimore attending my cousin’s wedding. There were the questions from aunts and uncles about when I’d be getting married, since just about every year it seems like I attend the wedding of a younger cousin. I’d be lying if I said that the same thought doesn’t goes through my own head during these times also, but of course I don’t say the answer I’m thinking when asked. Instead, I laugh and joke, “Probably never.” And then an uncle will talk about he misses his single days, telling me to enjoy it.

But the real answer, the thing I don’t tell them, is this: I don’t know when, or even if, I’ll ever get married. It’s certainly not happening anytime soon, since usually some long-term serious relationship precedes getting married, which I am definitely not in right now. Most days, I think that I’d like to get married some day, but honestly I don’t know if it’s in the cards for me. There are some single, older people in my family and they seem a little defeated and I fear that that may be my future. But I don’t want it to be. My second greatest fear (after death obviously) is looking defeated, that life won, that dreams weren’t realized, that not everything was done that could have been.

It’s what I fear a lot. The fear is much bigger than the thought that I may be single my whole life, that I won’t settle down with someone. That’s a piece of the fear certainly, but a piece that comes in and out of play. Sometimes, it’s not even a piece at all. The fear is broader than that - it’s the fear that I’m not doing with my life everything I should be, the fear that I am not utilizing my talents, the fear that I’m not writing, the fear that I’m not at the best job I could be doing, the fear that I’m not making as much money as I’d like to, the fear that I am either falling short or that I already have, that it might already be past tense - that I fell short.

Seeing this guy that I have seen a few times lately, this beautiful man, is also bringing these thoughts to the fore just because he is so successful and makes a living doing his creative pursuits. He makes me want to write more, want to do everything more. I have been writing a bit more. I want to make some videos soon after this weekend in Vegas coming up. There are lot of little projects on my mind, things I have been meaning to do, things that I am going to start making time to do. We’ve got one go-around here. I don’t want to be in my fifties and having younger relatives look at me as if I have been defeated by life at some future family gathering. I don’t want to look in the mirror and see that myself.

We rode back from Baltimore on the Bolt Bus, our seat not even entirely attached to the bus, jolting back and forth with each acceleration, with each brake. I thought about these things some more, but more so I thought about getting a burrito. I slept a lot. I was incredibly hungover. Story of my life (so far). Changes coming soon.

Thursday, July 9, 2015

"Number One Dance Song in Heaven" - Sparks

Afterwards, getting off his bed to wipe the cum from my chest, I said, “Um, so I have a big crush on you, just an FYI.”

“You have no filter,” he said. We kissed and cleaned ourselves off.

We had met up for drinks earlier in the evening at Daddy’s, a couple blocks from his house. We talked about our weekends and then I ranted about trash cans. There was a DJ playing music. A song was played that I really liked, that was really familiar, but I couldn’t identify it, had no clue who sang it. Shazam failed me, unable to identify it over bar chatter. Ask the DJ, he said. And out of some weird shame of not being as musically knowledgable as I want to be, I said I couldn’t. He, because he is a really cool dude that is that worthy of having a crush on, went and asked the DJ for me.

“Number One Dance Song in Heaven” by Sparks.

Back at his house, we drank vodka over his kitchen table and listened to music. Eventually he leaned over the table and kissed me, at which point we made our way to that earlier referenced bed.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Don Julian & The Larks - "Where I'm Comin' From"

We talked about technology and erotic desire, about their intersection. Even in an era of streaming video, of easily accessible HD porn right on our phones, we like still images, photographs. We speculated that it’s probably because we came of age in an era before fast computers, before broadband Internet. There was speculation about what this younger generation gets turned on by, whether still images have the same effect on them.

And then we went into his bedroom, turned on by the talk. He gave me a shirt to wear, something someone in a gym would wear. It was a prop, a costume. He told me the scene. I was to be Batman. I would be working out in the gym when suddenly I’d be surrounded by five guys, bad guys, and they’d punch me again and again in the stomach. It’s his fetish, punching someone in the stomach, this superhero role play. It had been about a year since I last saw him.

Afterwards, he asked me if he had hurt me. I told him no, that I’m tough. He complimented me on my v-lines, saying that, yes, I am tough.

Summer, never end. We talked about that also, before the punching, before the talk about technology and porn and sex. We talked about how amazing summer is and the type of life and feeling that is enabled by warm weather, by being able to simply stroll, to walk all the way across town if you feel like it, a city rediscovered, a self rediscovered.

Monday, July 6, 2015

the soothing drone of my air conditioner

There are few things as sexy as making out in the ocean with someone, feeling up each other's wet bodies, being splashed every so often in the face by saltwater, boners hidden just below the water's shifting surface, whilst that same shifting surface glitters with sunlight. It's pretty much up there on any best feelings in the world list that I can think of, at least as I am able to do so right now, memory of yesterday still very fresh on my mind.

He was with the same group of friends that I sat on the beach with, a couple towels away. I was taken with his babeliness as soon as I saw him. The beach was filled with babes, gorgeous men anywhere you looked, sexual fantasies being played out each time I shifted my gaze, no matter which way your eyes went, the actors cast in hoped-for sexual escapades, fantasies imagined from behind the safety of sunglasses. 

We were swimming with friends, the two of skinny dipping. Our friends peeled off, went back to shore, the water too cold to stay in as long as we had. I was cold but I wanted to keep bobbing near this person's body as long as possible. The coldness didn't matter - it could be endured to continue to be near this person. We talked about something, I don't even know what. I just kept letting my body get closer and closer to his, thinking about the moment my skin could touch his. And it happened and it was really fucking sexy, making out in this ice cold water, lettings our dicks graze against each other underwater, the taste of the ocean in every kiss.

I got a ride back with him and his friend. A car ride, going along the shores of south Brooklyn, Verrazano Bridge looking colossally regal in the lowering sun. He came back to my house. We showered together and made out in my bed before sitting on my couch, drinking beers, and listening to Fleetwood Mac. It was a really fucking cute day.

It was a really fucking cute weekend. The 4th involved fireworks watched from some tall condo building in Williamsburg, running around full of joy, going here and there and there, eating some guy's asshole for about half an hour in the stalls at Lovegun, sexting with him until six in the morning for some reason, eggs, coffee, sunshine, life. 

I don't know what summer is, other than that it is a season when everything is warm and things are more fun. I don't know if it means more than that. I am pretty sure it does though. The promise of fun living, of a type of living that should happen all the time, tends to reveal itself in these summer months. I just want to sustain that feeling through changing weather, to hold on to this forever. And in that, the story of life, not wanting it to end, not wanting to die, wanting this time here on this planet being so happy, to extend forever. When we say we never want summer to end what we are saying is that we are terrified of dying. 

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Jim Croce - "Working at the Car Wash Blues"

We were seated in one of the booths at one of my favorite places in New York City, already layered with the memories of so many things, loves of my life, dates, drunken post-bar hangouts with friends, so many nights eating there by myself, so many memories from nights over the last thirteen years since I've lived here. And now another memory can now be layered on to this already well-papered place. Waiting for our food, seated across from me, he said, "I can't wait to kiss you."

After leaving there, on the corner of Graham and Grand Street, I kissed him, not wanting it to be an awkward thing that we fumbled toward later on at one of our apartments. Let's cross that line now, get the first kiss out of the way. We know it's going to happen.

And so we kissed and we kissed and it felt so good. We then walked down Graham and at Powers Street, we paused. I asked him if he wanted to come to my apartment. He said yes. We turned down Powers Street.

This is the guy I met last Friday at Metropolitan. We'd made plans to meet for drinks at Tuffet. I sat in the backyard nursing a martini, awkwardly looking at my phone, waiting for him to get there. He arrived and was jut as beautiful as I had remembered. He was wearing a shirt with a pot leaves pattern, which as I do with just about everything, took to be a sign. A sign that this is my dream man. When he sat down, I couldn't believe my luck, that this guy seemed to be interested in me.

We had awkward conversation, had conversation about the awkward conversation of first dates, and then had better conversation, much better. Drinks probably played a key role here.

I honestly can't think of the last time I've been on a date, let alone on something that the participating parties actually refer to as a date. Let's just say, it's been a really long time, years I think. So I'm not really practiced at making charming, engaging conversation with a person I don't know, that my skills in that are bordering somewhere between rusty and non-existent.

At my apartment, we smoked weed and listened to Led Zeppelin II. Earlier, I had been going on and on about how amazing a band Zeppelin is, how obsessed with them I've been this past week. We made out in my bed in our underwear and paused to talk and then made out more and then talked more. He left because he had stuff to do early in the morning.

I was happy today, really happy. Happy in the way that one gets after a nice night with a guy. I forgot that after making out with someone you like, that its effects continue, that the moment of joy has a very, very long tail that continues waving excitedly well into the next day, if not days, recalling moments, recreating joy, excited about the next time you'll see this person, and generally just being thrilled to be alive. What I'm saying is that I was really happy today and only slightly hungover.