what size do i get him?

I am listening to old Snoop Dog songs. I am listening to George Clinton, who I love. I am listening to Alicia Myers' "I Want to Thank You," which is an absolutely amazing song in every way, and which I heard on the radio today, and I remembered again, like I do every time I hear it on the radio, what a fucking fantastic song it is, and I turned up the radio really loud and briefly entered a period of bliss that was enabled by this song and lasted for just slightly longer than the song's duration.

I am sick, which seems to be a recurring thing this winter. I have been recovering from one bout of sickness only to come down with another bout. My back is still in pain. I have eczema on one of my hands. I am an old man.

Hey Jealousy

On Friday night, Diego came over for some drinks before we were to head out to a bar to go dancing. A friend doing that thing, casually asking about gossip he heard concerning a friend, he said to me, "Wait, so what happened with you and Jacob and C?" I was embarrassed that he had heard about this, had pretty much forgotten about it. I think it was at this point that not only my night, but my entire weekend, began to take on a different course than it otherwise would have. My head started to throb with anger. It was basically a scene from Kill Bill where the Bride sees an enemy, red flashes over her eyes and "Ironside" playing. The beer I was drinking wasn't strong enough to stifle this anger I felt coming over me. I took a shot of whisky immediately. I tried to act casual, asked, "Wait, what did you hear?"

The answer was something along the lines of: "Nothing, just that Jacob and C had been hooking up and you got really jealous and freaked out." I explained what happened to Diego, asked him how he heard about this, heard that C told some person who then told Diego. More flashes of red, "Ironside" blaring.

The reason I was getting so angry is because Diego knew more about this than I did, that it seemed a few people did. I was very angry because Jacob had clearly lied to me when he told me the one time I did freak out on him via text message that C and him were just hanging out, that I was acting crazy. C is a person that we had a threesome with early on in the summer. Jacob continued to have a crush on him after the fact, which I was vaguely aware of in the way he continued to talk about him and the fact that they would often text each other. I was a bit suspicious that there was something more going on, but also didn't really want to know for sure. But a month or so ago, he told me he was having dinner with him at the Indian place that we always went to. That sounded too much like a date to me. It also made me insanely angry that it was at a place the two of us often went together. I was high I believe and stared texting him nasty things, things along the lines of "Have fun hanging out with your new boyfriend." He came home many hours later and told me that they had just been hanging out. I knew he was lying. I know that that Indian place doesn't let you linger post-dinner at your table, that they rush you in and out.

So to hear a story from Diego that contained details confirming Jacob had been lying really, really upset me. Diego and I got very drunk and watched lots of Beyonce videos on YouTube. We did not end up going out. At some point, Jacob came home from work and Diego stumbled home. I asked Jacob why I would be hearing this story from Diego, how he would even know about it, was quite angry that Jacob had shared my feelings with this guy, C, very, very angry that this was now making the rounds of gossip for New York queerdos. Again, he told me that C and him had just been hanging out. I was very drunk and I started yelling truths I knew, told him he was lying, that I knew they had been fucking. He admitted they had been. And it came out, finally, some honesty.

I was angry and felt sick. Something had been broken that I cared a lot about; a schoolyard bully had just stepped on an art project I had made with popsicle sticks. We were supposed to be honest with each other. We had an open relationship, yes, but we were also honest with each other, were supposed to be. This was deception, lying, cheating. I told him that I didn't want to be with him anymore, that he should fucking call C and move in with him. Lying is a huge deal to me and I was quite heartbroken by this. I wanted to go back in time and allow honesty to try to occur, that now and always our relationship would not be capable of total trust, that now I would always have reason to doubt, that I had already been lied to. The thing had been broken, stomped on.

Yesterday, while he was at work, I wondered if I was still supposed to buy him a Christmas present, if we were going to be together or not. I tried to figure out what I wanted, kept wishing I didn't need to, kept wishing he would not have lied to me. I cried because I thought this was something different, because I didn't want to say goodbye to another person close to me, didn't want to have another person floating around in this city that I used to be so close to and now never talk to, a beautiful past conjured with seeing them out at bars, and that contrasted with the sorry state of present things, saying hello and quickly moving past each other. Over texts, we agreed we should talk last night.

He came home and we talked. We ate Mexican food and played on our respective Apple products. Later, I asked him if I should turn off the lights in our bedroom when I saw him asleep in bed, book fallen to his side. He said yes, and told me he also wanted a hug. We hugged and I told him that he couldn't lie to me anymore, ever again, that this other romance needed to end. I turned off the bedroom lights and went into the living room. I read David Remnick's excellent piece about Russia in this week's New Yorker, often having to reread certain paragraphs, his narrative blurring with my own, that despite my eyes scanning these lines and reading them, my mind thought about this boy asleep in the other room and my relationship with him, about what one is to do with life, how one best goes about it, the things we endure.

Montreal

I was on muscle relaxers and Benadryl. It was in the middle of the night when we stopped at the Canadian border, the bus driver delivering instructions to us over the loudspeaker that I was still too groggy to entirely comprehend as real and not as a voiceover in a dream. Giant, stadium-like lighting lit up the place a clinical white, this large stretch of asphalt out in the middle of nowhere. Jacob and I answered some questions, showed our passports, and soon were back on the bus. A bit more sleep and then we pulled into the bus station at Montreal around five in the morning. We dropped our bags off at the hotel, a room not ready, asked the guy at the front desk if he could recommend a place still open that served food and where we could hide out from the cold. He mentioned the McDonald's a block away.

We consulted our guidebook instead, not traveling to a frigid Montreal, eight hours by an overnight bus, to eat at McDonalds. We found a 24 hour diner, La Banquise, famous for its poutine. We walked past the McDonald's, past the bus station, and through the pre-dawn streets of Montreal, observing the exterior staircases on many of the buildings, the French signage all around us, and very slowly, light started to appear at one far corner of the sky. Some early morning joggers passed us as we walked along the edge of a park, matching up street by street a physical city with a street grid presented to us on a map.

The diner was playing Belle and Sebastian. This was a sign as sure as there needed to be that this was the place we should be in at this moment in time. We split an order of poutine and a breakfast plate, had some coffees, discussed what we could do during these early morning hours in a city we didn't know, and watched the sky lighten outside the window we were sitting against, a city coming into being. Despite the vomit-like appearance of poutine and despite the fact that it is a plate of fries covered in gravy and cheese curds, it was actually quite good, much more so than I expected.

With food and coffee in our system and nothing still open yet, we walked to Parc du Mont-Royal, and hiked to the top of the "mountain" that gives the city its name. There is a gorgeous view from the top of the city below. We took it in, took some photos, thought about extending this specific moment in time into future moments, this a memento to look back on at some point when scrolling through pictures on my phone or when looking at photos I have posted to Facebook.

More wanderings around the city, tiredness setting in, not much sleep had on the bus, and around one in the afternoon, we checked into our room and took a long nap. We woke up around happy hour time and had numerous drinks at a couple of the bars on rue Sainte Catherine. We took the subway a stop and ate dinner at cute bistro, L'Express, and then took the subway back a stop and went right on back to drinking in the Gay Village.

We went to Campus, a gay strip bar I had wanted to go to for quite a while. There seem to be a large number of porn stars that I really love that have come out of Montreal and this was a bar I had frequently seen listed in appearances by some of these porn stars. So there was that and there was my love of seeing naked men, really the same reason I believe, and so the two of us went to this bar quite drunk and eager to see naked flesh.

There is a stage up front and then tables surrounding the stage, right up against it, and then a bar behind these tables where you could sit and watch the stage with a very clear sightline. For whatever reason, there were many Christmas decorations up on stage, reindeer with heads that moved back and forth. I am also imagining a giant candy cane, though I could be wrong about that detail. Gay strip clubs barely exist as such in much of the US and so I was very excited to try out the numerous strip clubs Montreal has. Washington, DC used to have a really excellent gay strip club scene but most of the bars were razed a few years ago to make room for the baseball stadium they built in Southeast DC. The first strip club I went to, probably when I was 18, was Wet. This bar, mythic in my memory, is now gone. DC is very liberal with its liquor laws. Most states have laws that don't allow liquor to be served if a bar has full nudity on stage. DC does not have such laws and so had a really thriving gay strip club scene for a while. Montreal also has no such laws and so Jacob and I sat there at a table against the stage, pretending to fan ourselves, mouthing "So hot" at all the sexy flesh on display, at all the beautiful dicks that made their way across the stage.

We wanted to try out the other big strip club in Montreal and so walked a couple blocks down to Stud, which charged a small cover (unlike Campus) and which was also much larger of a club. For this reason, there were some insanely hot men that made their way across the stage, but it also felt at a further remove than the set-up at Campus. After watching some insanely sexy man play with his cock on stage, I found him afterwards and bought a lap dance from him for Jacob and I. He brought us back into a curtained off tiny little room and sat us down on a couch against the wall. He got naked and writhed his body against us. We felt him up as he danced for us, touching his ass, his back, his chest, his cock, wanting to have more access to this body, a frustration and also a pleasure had in the remove, in the distance preventing us from being able to suck his dick or for him to fuck us, that this is what it was, this lap dance where we could touch him, and the longing for more stoked our desire, made the thing almost unbearable. Jacob and I left soon after to fuck each other back in our hotel room, the horniness too much to further suppress.

The next day, we wandered around the city more, ate more food, napped again, and then found ourselves wandering drunk down Sainte Catherine looking for fun. We went to Unity on the advice of several cute guys, but the club was awful. There were what appeared to be some seriously underaged boys there, some boys looking barely 14. And, okay, maybe I can look past that. But what I cannot look past is terrible music. When they started playing Black Eyed Peas' "I Gotta Feeling," that's when it was time to go.

We decided to hit up another strip club, Taboo. This was one of the most amazing bars I have ever been to. It was like walking into a shady strip club in the 1970s. Coming to this bar after hitting up Campus and Stud did this bar no favors. Both of those are very nice bars with insanely sexy men. There is something very sad about Taboo, off a lonely side street. The audience was mainly old men sipping their waters. The bar was run down but in such a beautiful way, a small long stage surrounded by a few tables, red lights as the main light source, a small bar in the back. It would be a great set for a film about a sad strip club or a photo shoot. Everything about the bar was absolutely perfect and despite the fact that it probably wouldn't be my first choice if I were to return to a gay strip club in Montreal, there was something so hypnotic about the place. The strippers were definitely the B team of Montreal strippers, guys that could not make it to Campus or Stud. Their bodies were not on point, their dance moves were definitely not on point, and many of the guys were wearing old, saggy briefs that did them no compliments. A French-Canadian boy felt up my cock when I was peeing in the bathroom. I looked at him and he said he did not mean to offend. I told him he did not offend. I think he was embarrassed though and left the bar soon after. As much as the two of us were fascinated by this train wreck of a bar, we eventually wanted to see some sexy naked men again and so headed back to Campus.

I am now in my thirtieth year on this planet and still no closer to being bored by the sight of naked men than I was when I was a young boy and looking at the naked men I would occasionally see in gym locker rooms. That there are things that can still manage to hold my interest after so many years and in such an intense way is a great thing.

There is a table for me in a few decades at Taboo, where I will be hopefully drinking something stronger than water. The pleasure I got from seeing these audience members was that of a kinship and of a knowledge that this is something that will never bore me, that when everything else does, there will still be young flesh to gaze upon, the human form to admire, bodies to long over.

1Q94

I bought a Powerball ticket for last night's game. Not one number matched. My lower back hurts in a way I'm not sure it has ever before. Bending over to pick things up or getting up from a sitting position is almost comically painful. I play the part of an old man, moaning and sighing over little tasks. I woke up this way. I'm not sure what brought this about - perhaps sleeping wrong, perhaps working out wrong, or perhaps a sign of aging. Maybe some combination of all three. I kept on taking naps today because it was about the most comfortable thing I could do and because also there was some part of me that imagined, hoped, I would wake up and it would go away. That I could blink my eyes and it would disappear. Click your heels three times and dream of home. Something like that.

I am listening to Smashing Pumpkins and drinking coffee. Soon I may look at jobs to apply to. Probably not, though. Later, after I fail to look for jobs, I am going to see Erykah Badu sing some songs in midtown with Jacob and I cannot wait.

I have been trying to read Murakami's 1Q84 for the past couple weeks now, have had in my possession for that long at least. It sits in various rooms of my house, either by my bed or by my couch and every few days or so I will remember that I want to read it and attempt to, but the weight of the thing really makes it an awkward book to get comfortable with. Today, bed-ridden, I took up the thing again. I am listening to Smashing Pumpkins and reading Murakami and going to see Erykah Badu and it could easily be ten years ago I suppose.

chilaquiles

Chilaquiles really might be at their best twenty minutes or so after they are served. The same argument could potentially be made for pizza. Sometimes the thing is better once it has cooled, when the more liquid aspects to the dish, the melted cheese, the salsa, become something else, something with more solid attributes. Chilaquiles taste best like this when you are hungry and stoned and in love with the weird, chicken-like texture tortilla chips have once they have soaked up all the salsa in the dish. The joy in eating this particular dish is a joy because it presents to us the sturdy tortilla chip, and we see its proud back brought down by the blows of some giant who had been offscreen until this moment, a threat only hinted at by the dark clouds off on the horizon our hero was marching toward. We see a giant tripped up by rope, fallen to the earth. We see that boy who seemed something else take a dick up his ass and make a face of pain, a pure emotion one didn't think possible, his detached badinage making you believe, falsely, that this guy was too cool for it all, over it. A desire's broad outlines somehow satisfied with each bite of the chilaquiles. We see the thing's will broken, and, more importantly here, feel our own asserted by its submission.

We eat and eat and cannot stop. The food runs out though, and we are forced to.

Sunday

I am not sure that there is much to The Muppets movie, not sure there needs to be. It was a fun afternoon at the movies though, watching this ragtag bunch of puppets from my childhood make self-aware jokes about their datedness, about their irrelevance. There was a happy ending, there usually is.

From there, I went to the bookstore to find a travel guide to Montreal for my weekend trip I am taking in two weeks. Jacob and I have booked overnight tickets on a Greyhound bus for a couple weeks from now and are going to spend three days exploring a city neither of us has ever been to, a city with poutine, naked go-go boys, and French speakers. I am very excited.

I went to the gym and worked out to the point that my arms are very sore and despite these numerous trips to the gym weekly, despite the soreness, there is not the instantaneous massive arms I want to appear - that thing that happens with the Hulk when he gets angry. I showered and bought a nice bottle of wine from Warehouse Wine and Spirits, probably my favorite wine store in New York. It's like the Strand of wine stores, old and dusty and too well-lit, but such great deals to be had.

Jacob and I made curry, drank some wine, and now each of us is staring at separate screens, our MacBooks before us, a distance of only a few feet in one sense separating us, distances in other senses separating us that are quite bigger.

Thanksgiving

I was riding home tonight on the train back from Delaware, the past couple days spent with my family outside of this city, outside of my comfort zone, a bit bored. It was what it was. Good and surely revitalizing in the ways that being with the family are - in ways that are both clear and also very unclear, very below the surface, that some good on the atomic level comes about by being around these people you spent many years on this planet with, with the people that brought you forth into this world, the people responsible for your atoms. And yet there are atoms just as well responding to their influence in less receptive ways, pushing away from each other, making you want to distance yourself from this type of life in the suburbs, this type of comfort, that this is why you moved to this city, and some sparks long thought blown out again show a small orange ember and there is the desire to live differently, to make it in this world and to live a life worth meaning, said with emphasis, verbally letting you know that in print this is a part that would be italicized, that you want that type of life and are serious about it, that this desire is again rekindled by being around your family, which though you love, you also want to be very different from, other than.

I watched too much television over this time, realize how much of it I watch in New York - too much since I knew about all of these shows, these stars, was able to partake in conversations easily concerning them. I wanted to distance myself from this culture, create a different one, and that's why I moved to this city I now live in and something happened and I am not sure what but I was reminded of some original intentions these past couple days, again wanted an old beat-up Saab 900 that I could cover the back of with bumper stickers that articulated far more forcefully than I would ever do so now, ideas and concepts I was excited, proud, to embrace. There is a critical distance now where a pride that proud becomes something else, tacky, gauche.

I slept and read a copy of Men's Fitness that I bought in the Amtrak waiting area in Wilmington for $4.99, the headlines revealing ways for me to obtain abs and sex secrets, and how could I not purchase a thing promising such things? I have been on a fitness kick lately that is tied to a perhaps unhealthy zeal about trying to get abs and to become more built. After I finished this magazine that I was only mildly embarrassed to read on the train, shielding it a bit when people walked past, I tried reading 1Q84, but that put me to sleep much as it did on the way down to my family's house. I slept and didn't and looked at what type of people showed up on my Grindr feed in these towns outside of New York. The lights of New York began to appear out in the dark, past my own fluorescent-lit reflection and that of my fellow passengers, the city's lights visible if I unfocused my eyes, let their focus on a close world relax enough so they could see the one beyond this one, the many other ones there. A skyline I used to see was there in this new one. Freedom Tower is now gigantic looking when you approach at night from New Jersey, it towering over anything near. It has a flat top, as it's still being built, no antenna yet to give it more shape. A massive block of light on each floor, the floors rising week by week. It's nice to see. It changes the skyline and doesn't. It's still a big light of hope saying EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE when you approach it from New Jersey after saying goodbye to your family. It's the same place you ran to, the Emerald City we staggered to through poppy fields. Even with that gigantic Freedom Tower now there, it is still the skyline I saw when I first moved here, this place I had dreamed of since I was a kid, and finally, finally fucking made it to, that, tonight, I was again so fucking grateful to have made it to this place.

Happy Together

Another weekend nearly gone by, another work week about to start, which also will somehow go by quicker than expected. Thanksgiving will pass. Christmas will too. And soon these things will come around again, again seemingly sooner than one's notion of time seems to allow for.

This weekend started, appropriately, with a snatch of conversation that has been repeating in my head ever since it was uttered. It was Dwayne's birthday and he was having a dinner at Dallas BBQ. I was seated next to an old co-worker, Sara, and she asked me what I was doing, if I was ever going to leave the hotel. I said I wanted to, but that I was lazy, that I hated looking for jobs, that I didn't even know what to try to do. If I had had more to drink at this point or if it had been in a setting outside of someone's birthday festivities, I might have been more introspective, more honest, said that I feel a bit trapped, that I don't know any longer how to go about doing things, that I feel old at times, that I have perhaps missed the boarding of certain boats. Because she is great and doesn't pooh-pooh around the issue, because she also worked the same job, she said, "You don't want to be forty and still be working at [the hotel]."

And, no, I don't. I didn't want to be thirty and still be working there. But time really does move fast and one has to be nimble and keep ahead of it, which I have not been doing. I have been drifting along on its currents, carried forward in this same job I have been doing for three years now. It is somehow Thanksgiving on Thursday.

And so I was eager to leave this brightly-lit restaurant, put those thoughts behind me, let them be less visible in a darkened bar. Erica and I went to Rawhide. We ran into some friends on the street and dragged them there with us. I drank a couple of strong drinks and felt my anxiety easing. I watched go-go boys dance, desired bodies, listened to shit music, and felt better, felt again soothed by time's currents, carried away again, not fighting the current any longer. From there, we all went to the bar at the Chelsea Hotel.

Francois Sagat was in attendance at this party and I went into stalker mode, staring at him all night, barely listening to whomever I was with, eyeing Sagat, looking for a moment when he might be by himself so I could say hello. At some point, this moment came. I had had quite a bit to drink by this point and was a drooling fanboy, but he was way more polite than he needed to be, friendly even. He had a beautiful smell, a sexy BO. I wanted to bury my face in his armpits, inhabit that smell. I shook his hand instead.

When I woke up insanely hungover yesterday, I remembered to jerk myself off with that same hand before showering, thought dirty thoughts, thought about touch and connections and human bodies and internet bodies.

I went back to sleep, slept off my hangover, and then went last evening to see Happy Together at MoMA. Desire and sadness and dreams were projected on to a screen and I projected my own baggage, memories, and associations on to those projections. The images and scenes and slowed down bits and smokiness kept burning an afterimage all night, Wong Kar-Wai often being able to do these things to me. At Eastern Bloc afterwards, Cyndi Lauper's "Money Changes Everything" was played, a song that for reasons I don't entirely understand really cuts deep for me. I got emotional and sipped my cocktail and talked to Jacob about a trip to Canada.

laser lights sending fallen dominoes back upright, one and then the next

The music was terrible, as it has lately been anytime I have bothered go to Sugarland on a Friday. The fog machines and lasers were doing their best to compensate but the dance floor was still empty. Everyone was crowded at the front of the bar, far from the dance floor. There was a two hour open bar happening and I had drink after drink, talked and did not talk with a group of SVA students. My mind kept wandering. Green lasers kept racing across surfaces and I thought about time, specifically the years I have spent in New York. It was the 4th anniversary of this particular bar and on Sunday night, I spent a similar evening at its sister bar, Metropolitan, when that bar celebrated its 9th anniversary.

I have been in New York now for eight and a half years. My first apartment that I signed a lease to was just a couple blocks from Metropolitan and I lived there for a few years, oftentimes spending several nights a week at Metropolitan. I met a boy at that bar that I had my first New York relationship with. That didn't end so well and I threw myself at him every time I continued to see him at Metropolitan, perhaps started going to this particular bar even more after this, the hope of seeing him, of going home with him if I could manage to say the right things, be charming or desperate enough.

I have hooked up with countless boys from that bar, done lines of coke in its bathroom, spent many summer Sunday afternoons on its back patio getting sloppier and sloppier. I have also now at this point in my life calmed down quite a bit from those early years of mine in New York, settled down in many senses of the phrase. My trips to the bar have become less and less frequent. It is weird to think that my time in New York and Metropolitan's coincides so closely.

I don't know where I am going with any of these thoughts. I am not sure where one ever intends to go when they start strolling down memory lane looking at boarded up windows that they once used to live in. But that's what was happening last evening. I didn't really know anyone other than Jacob and his SVA friends. I thought about when Sugarland first opened, how I was there for that. Smoking on the roof patio last night, I could see a tall unoccupied condo building that Sugarland was now in the shadow of. That did not used to be there. When the bar first opened, the Williamsburg real estate bubble was popping and everything around this bar looked bombed out, razed lots, half finished construction projects. Apparently the money has now come back for big condo projects. This building was a depressing sight to see, obstructing a view of the night sky that used to be fairly unobstructed.

Jacob at one point asked about the mural of Domino Sugar Factory at the front of the bar, wondering why it was in the bar. I was a little blown away that he didn't know the building's history and its relationship to this neighborhood, that it was less than a decade ago still an operational factory, that its closure in 2004 (a year after I moved here) was a very potent symbol of Williamsburg's manufacturing decline, that what had once been an active industrial waterfront was no longer, that the bar took its name from this, that it was a cutesy reference to this part of Williamsburg's history that had only recently come to a close.

My mind wandered even more so now, this brief retelling of the neighborhood's recent history throwing about green lasers all over other surfaces of my mind, things briefly illuminated, memories of beds and boys and shit jobs and hungover mornings and bike rides and endless slices of pizza.

The open bar ended. The music was still shit. The dance floor was still empty. Jacob was too drunk for his own good. We went to Anna Maria's and had some slices before hopping on the train home.

umlilo

I woke up yesterday morning with a slight sore throat. I took some Advil and some vitamins intended to ward off this cold and went to work. Work became more and more unbearable. I could feel a fever developing more and more, a headache becoming more and more pounding, my head literally feeling like it was about to split open. From work, I came straight home and went to bed. I have not had pants on in what is now 24 hours. I called in sick to work today and have been lying around in bed or on the couch, watching The Only Way is Essex, porn, YouTube clips, and feeling like shit.

I am drinking a cup of coffee now in an attempt to feel normal, as coffee is a necessary part of my day in order to feel normal. Sweat beads are popping up all over my forehead.

I can already see the rays of the sun becoming more and more horizontal, it nearing sundown already at this early hour. I am thinking about how I should think more about certain things, not necessarily thinking about those things mind you, just rather telling myself I should be thinking about them more sometime soon, some future date, not necessarily now.

Among these things: Figuring out a way to manage my finances, so I quit overdrawing my bank account every single month when my rent check is deposited. Finding a new career outside of hotels. Researching ways to quickly gain muscle. Figuring out a place in Central America to vacation soon. Again figure out a way to manage my finances, so that that can happen. Figure out a way to get my wisdom teeth removed. Again see that admonition about finances.

Looking at that list, I see it as stupid. I also am getting soaked in sweat due to this cold and this very hot coffee. Sweat it out, start again. Burn it to the ground. Dance around the flames and send up your prayers skyward with the smoke.