aw, shoot!

Not sure why, but I really enjoy drawing cowboys. It was probably a stretch to make the subject of this week's illustration a cowpoke, but, oh well. Sometimes you have to go with your gut. And the idea of a guy who brings a gun to Lakewood made me giggle. What was the show?

Blotter: A 43-year-old man said he lost his gun ...

show queens

Show: Absinthe @ the Spiegeltent
Seen: Aug. 9 with EMC and JP
Synopsis: Vaudeville meets burlesque meets Cirque du Soleil meets ... Splash? I was shocked by the homoeroticism of this bawdy sideshow, which included two comely English Gents doing amazing acts in their skivvies and a bathing beauty in the grand finale who left a lot of us in the audience moist — literally. (There's also a stark naked female magician, for those of you who go for such.) Read my full review here.
Verdict: Run, don't walk to the Spiegeltent. The show runs through October, along with a world of other wonders.


Show: Kiki & Herb: Alive on Broadway
Seen: Aug. 16 with Gayest Neil
Synopsis: The undead cabaret duo just keeps coming back, this time with a meandering
Broadway bid that's preternaturally obsessed with the end of the world and the birth of Christ (don't ask). Though the whiskey-soaked hilarity lags at the halfway point, there's still something intoxicating about watching these two in action. I loved the song choices: Their cover of "First Day of My Life" made me download the original by Bright Eyes, and the Mountain Goats' "No Children" may well be the giddiest song about marital dysfunction ever written. Kudos too to Kiki for the sharp political commentary in the second act, which calls for Dubya to do himself in (or mayhaps go on a huntin' trip with Dick) and also tackles gay marriage and American apathy over the Iraqi War. But how will Ma and Pa Kansas who land in the Helen Hayes after a stop at TKTS take it?
Verdict: I've seen K&H four times this year, so I'm a little over their schtick right now. Still, it's worth seeing. A tip: Smuggle in a flask. Horror of horrors, there's no bar!


Show: Rainy Days and Mondays
Seen: Aug. 19 with Beaver
Synopsis: God bless the Fringe Festival. Where else are you going to catch such strange little plays like this one, an uneven but oddly entertaining drama that follows Brian (hottie Michael Carbonaro of Another Gay Movie) earning his Party Boy merit badge on the gay circuit in the mid-'90s. The action happens in a series of hotel rooms: Black & Blue in Montreal, Gay Disney, White Party, Sydney's Mardi Gras — you know, the usual spots a newbie would naturally hit in a single calendar year.
We watch as Brian goes through all the usual firsts: His first K-hole (awwww), his first bump of coke (precious!), his first time meeting Tina (she's a bitch!). You can guess there's lots of fag drama along the way, including the unwelcome return of the ghost of Brian's lover who died of AIDS (seriously) and a weird love triangle between Brian's messy friends, who reminded me a lot of Sky and Soiree from the Chelsea Boys comic strip. But whatevs.
Verdict: Was that a cum-stained tank top we just saw on stage? Do another line, bitch! Werk.

what was the lemon juice for?

This week's Blotter doodle: A woman with a shaved head was sitting on the sidewalk in front of the SunTrust Plaza ...

I'm not really sure where the Buddha idea came from, but it seemed to fit the situation.

project runaway

Continuing our streak of frivolous posts that strictly ignore any serious meditation on the hard truths of the human condition, I've gotten a lot of shit today at the office.
Seems my co-workers absolutely hate my shirt. Beaver keeps referring to it as "the blouse," and another bitch colleague called it "very Star Treky." This coming from a guy who's wearing the exact same outfit as yesterday (cough-Slut-cough) and another who looks like he went Dumpster diving behind Housing Works.

It's actually the BF's shirt, so there.

masterpiece theatre?

OK, I've heard it from two three people now: Why is your blog so depressing/somber/serious lately?
"You've lost your short, punchy sentences," said one critic, "and it's turned into these long, meandering tales of your life. It's very ... Masterpiece Theatre."

Yikes.

Well, to give you bloodthirsty carnivores some roadkill to chew on, here's a trashy and tragic tale of wayward youth.

One thing I didn't mention in my previous Pines post was that this also happened to be my company's annual day at the beach on Fire Island. And because I work for a gay company, you can guess what happens next. One word: Sloppy.
Not me, but a particular colleague, who I'll refer to as Beaver, felt the need to drop trou and show everyone the junk in his trunk. It was the weirdest thing: One second Beaver was seemingly stone cold sober. The next, he was just shy of Mel Gibson picking a fight with all the Jews in the world. Actually Beaver didn't pick any fights, but the sass and the ass were both forthcoming as he got friendly in the hot tub with, oh, everyone else who happened to be in the hot tub.

As one been-there-done-that-sniffed-the-bottom-of-the-bumper guest at the party confided to me, "I don't understand why people get drunk and naked at company events. I mean, today is Saturday, but it sure will be Monday soon."

Monday came today for Beaver, and he turned beet red as more and more tales of his tail came to light. There's even a video of him flashing his fanny and acting the fool in the water. I remarked to another colleague how Beaver sounds like a drunken Sherry Lewis on the video. "Lambchop's more like it," this wit snapped back, "considering that he had somebody's hand stuck up his ass."

Shall we go back to the navelgazing now, kids?

penultimate pines

It’s autumn already — at least in the mind of my BF. On Friday he said, "Can you see how the light has changed?" meaning that the season doesn't look like summer anymore, even though I'm not sure I agree with him.

I will say I found the nights cooler on Fire Island this weekend than they were when we were out for Pines Party two weeks back. This was the fourth of our five weekends in the share on Shore Walk, and there was much talk of lasts, with a quiet understanding that our next scheduled visit in late September could very well be too cold for beach or pool time. The mood in the house felt somehow more morose, partly due to the notable absence of one housemate who couldn't make it out, and the unexpected presence of several additional guests, swelling our house's normal six to 10.

Saturday evening a gracious friend invited us over for a dinner party, the kind of meal that soon becomes legend thanks to its food and company. Ages at the table ranged from early 20s to middle 50s, all gay men. There was a discussion of lifespans, how American life expectancy seems to be decreasing due to obesity, and how studies imply that even with the best of all possible conditions the human organism can't hold together for more than 120 years. Later, the host brought up the film Longtime Companion, and mentioned that the lion’s share of the guys he knew on the island in the late 1980s are now deceased. Sitting among this crowd of sharply dressed, successful gay men, it was tough to imagine us as the generation that missed the plague, but just barely.

I left dinner thinking about the end of a summer and the way we process the past. There's a troubling sense that I didn't accomplish quite what I'd hoped with our island outings this year, though I can't say exactly what those goals would have been in the first place.
Sitting by the pool today, waiting for our 5:55 p.m. ferry, the BF said that he was glad of one thing: "At least it felt like we had a summer this year." He was referring to the particularly dull summer of 2004, our first in New York, when we sorely missed the pool parties and overall splendor of summers in Atlanta. More nostalgia, yes, but on this point, we agree.

i'm with the band

I had fun with this week's drawing for Blotter — not so much with the main guy, who kept looking retarded (which is fine, considering the item) but with the band in the background. It took me back to my days of seeing live shows in Athens and the copy-and-paste characters that seem to always populate such concerts.

Blotter: An officer responded to a noise complaint at a house ...

vitis vinifera

I never saw the Golden Gate Bridge during my first and, up until this weekend, only visit to San Francisco. I spent three days in the city in 2003 and the damn thing was hidden in fog every time I made it to the waterfront.

This weekend, I managed to see the bridge every day of the trip. I saw it, I drove over it, I snapped photos from near and far, I've done it.


The one thing left to do is walk across it, but Taures, our host for the weekend, advised against it. (See earlier posting about earthquakes.) I think he's being silly. I'd walk it, given the chance.

Friday night the BF arrived, and he was obviously thrilled to be back in San Francisco, a city he makes no bones about loving. I don't see S.F. the same way he does, though I do find it a fascinating and often beautiful place. Our whole time there, I could tell he was trying for me to see the same city as him, and I'm not sure I ever will.

In our rental car, the BF had wisely paid extra for an onboard navigation system. At long last he's learning to accept that sightless sea slugs have a better sense of direction than his, though it's been a long and hard journey to reach to this point.

The Hertz GPS tool, the "NeverLost," speaks in the nasal monotone of an uppity typing teacher. I quickly dubbed her "NeverRight," because bitch kept putting us on a crazy routes to reach even the most uncomplicated destinations. We also ended up on a lot of one-way streets going the wrong way. Sometimes even the satellites couldn't find us.

You can imagine her consternation when, on Sunday, we decided to drive up to Napa Valley and check out the wine country. Ms. NeverLost insisted that we take the Bay Bridge. I tried to explain that we wanted the scenic route across the Golden Gate, but she just couldn't get it and sulked for most of Marin County.


Having seen Sideways, I thought I knew what such a trip would entail. But that film (which is actually set in Santa Ynez, not Napa) fails to convey the splendor of the region. Napa and Sonoma do not feel like America: They are closer to a Mediterranean climate than anything I've experienced in the States. We spent our afternoon at the Robert Mondavi Winery, touring the grounds with a grey-haired guide named Linda, who the BF disliked from the start. She walked us through the rows of grapes that will someday become Cabernet Sauvignon, and urged us not to sample the fruit for it would spoil our later tasting.

More than a hundred pairs of hands will touch each vine before it completes one season, Linda said, and the plant itself can last for 30 or more years. It doesn't need irrigation to grow, but can find water seven feet below ground via a long and unseen tap root. I thought about the way a person can feel rooted to a particular place, and how that connection remains invisible to everyone else.

Inside the cavernous winery , we walked through the stages of production, the distilling and fermentation, with our guide detailing the precision that goes into the flavor of each bottle.

We went light on the tasting and left the winery without making a purchase. Driving back to the city, Ms. NeverLost got her way. She sent us back home via the opposite route, finally crossing on the Bay Bridge. The water was royal green and dotted with whitecaps; a sizeable bank of fog had shown up in time for dinner.

From the opposite side of the bay, the city appeared to be shrouded in cloud, like a drawing from a book of nursery rhymes. I could imagine Jack climbing the beanstalk to see a scene like this, or Gulliver waking up to a similar skyline. "Could you ever see yourself living here?" the BF asked me. By now the fog had lifted some and the city was starting to reveal itself more. I turned down the volume on the NeverLost and snapped a few more pictures out of the car window.

earthquakes, heat strokes

Temperatures reached 99 degrees today in NYC, surely the hottest day we've had since I came to the city. On the sidewalks in Chelsea you could feel the heat like a presence; it would hit you in the chest when you walked out of doors, sort of like being stuck under a constant hair dryer set on high. My shirt was spotted with sweat by the time I got to the office.

The heat actually killed four people in the city, three elderly shut-ins and one apparently homeless guy. I see the same crop of homeless folks every day on 7th Avenue, with a little variation, and they were going through it today. On the corner of 13th, a bearded white man in his middle 30s was half lounging against a fence, sweat pouring down his shoulders. He'd stripped to a dirty pair of white shorts. "Homeless" and "almost naked" nearly never go well together, and this was no exception.

The heat broke in the evening with scattered showers across the city, just in time to delay my flight to San Francisco. The 8 p.m. departure soon turned into 11 p.m., and people at EWR were pissed, camped out on the carpet and searching for electrical outlets. Flights were being cancelled left and right (funny what a little rain can do, I guess) and people were digging in for the night — a different kind of homeless, but the desperation starts to look the same.

My flight finally took off close to midnight, and the flight attendents were determined that no one should sleep. Between the booming volume on Dr. Doolittle 3 and being forcefed a steaming, processed chicken sandwich, I dozed for a few hours. I'm always afraid that I'm the asshole who's snoring, which keeps me up.

Once we landed, 5:48 a.m. my time, I was reminded of how creepy airports are when they're empty. It's like a Stephen King novel, though SFO smelled like freshly baked apple cinammon muffins. Which kind of added to the creepiness.

I got into a cab and as I was explaining my destination to the driver, a desperate-looking couple flagged the car down. They'd been stranded with no luggage, they said, and just needed to get to their hotel. The cabbie asked if I minded sharing. I said it was OK, but once they were in the car I thought about how potentially unsafe this could've been: What if the three of them were in cahoots? Next thing you know I'm dead in some ditch in San Bernadino.

But the couple did not look like thugs. He was 40ish, with Anderson Cooper hair and expensive glasses. He mentioned the weather in Valencia, which I took to be where he was coming from. She was 26, or so the dates would imply given an anecdote she told about being in an earthquake in 1989. They held hands the whole ride, and she talked about a "romantic" place she'd rented for them. There was more talk of earthquakes; apparently a minor tremor hit the area yesterday, though it only lasted for three seconds. I had a feeling that their relationship won't last much longer, though I'm sure by their body language that the earth will move for one or both of them later tonight.

When we arrived at Taures's apartment, the Spanish man insisted on paying the full fare. I eventually agreed. Rolling my bag up to the door of the building, I was struck by how brisk the air is here. The high today is only 65, which really sounds lovely.

i've still got sand in my shoes

The BF and I made a fast trip out to Fire Island this weekend, a last-minute decision to hit the annual Pines Party on the beach. We were on the island for less than 24 hours, but it somehow felt like a week. Good times. My camera's battery died before the party itself, sadly. Here are some shots I snapped during the day, and one patriotic photo left over from July 4's Invasion of the Pines.