Gym Time

You know how I hate trying anything new. However, in an effort to keep myself from falling into three of my most beloved ruts, over and over and over again, I was convinced tonight to abandoned my well-worn path.

I saw a bit of Hottie Zach on Saturday at the Gay American Heroes benefit at Therapy, though most of my time was dedicated to Jonathan in the first of four increasingly adventurous adventures. I had told Zach at Therapy they we would undoubtedly end up at a bar later and he should try to meet up with us. Unfortunately for him, he got stuck fixing a shelf for his roommate and Jonathan and I stayed too long at his friend Danny's birthday party (aka adventure #4), so Zach had to be postponed to another night.

He suggested we go to Gym, a sports bar in Chelsea most notable for its high number of patrons who enjoy white wine by the glass while assiduously ignoring whatever ESPN show is playing on the many flat panel TVs. Gym is most notable to me as the place in town with some of the cheapest drinks around, which always has a place in my miserly alcoholic heart. Even though I had promised Zach some time alone, I got a last minute plea from my ex-boyfriend Curtis, who was spontaneously in town to join him out as well. Figuring the more the merrier, I invited Mike to come along too.

As I walked into the bar, the first person I spotted was not Zach, but Greg, the very straight Associate Producer of my radio show, whose own birthday party had been adventure #3 on Saturday (which culminated with Jonathan and I being thrown unceremoniously out of a notorious smoldering dump known as One Little West Twelfth). Apparently after the show, Greg, his girlfriend Dawn and their main gay Dominick were in the mood for a cheap drink. Two out of the three wanted to go to a gay bar, and one out of the three wanted to watch the game, so modern math being what it is, they ended up on bar stools at Gym.

Lately I have become obsessed with putting photos of myself on Facebook. There are only two reasons for me to go on there constantly: play Scrabulous (a dying art form) and tag/caption photos. Dawn put up a slew of photos from Greg's birthday party and I wasn't in any of them. So in an attempt to right that wrong, I asked the coat check guy to retrieve my camera from inside my already checked coat so I could make a nuisance of myself with my flash. I got some photos with Greg and company, both taken by a reasonably attractive gay guy who seemed intent on cutting everyone who wasn't me out of the group shot, reducing Dawn to a very evocative pair of bangs in the second photo. But he didn't even try to hit on me. I was no sooner done looking over the digital shots that he was out the door like a shot himself. No matter.

Hottie Zach and his sensational roommate Laurel (aka The Freak Magnet, more on that later) joined us, as did Mike and Curtis in quick succession. The gang in place, we set about doing what we do best: drinking! But first, some back story:

Curtis and I dated back in 1998-1999 when he was a fresh college grad who I had bravely bought a drink for and given my number to at Revolver. We had good times, including attending Kathy Griffin's 1998 Christmas Party (where I first absorbed the desire to make cupcakes) and harassing Carol Liefer at A' votre Sante where when she dismissed my tired line "I'm a big fan" I impressed her by repeating word for word her routine about sex with an opthomalogist. By the time I got to the punch line, "How do you like it better? Like this? Or like this?" she was beaming like a kid on Christmas morning.

Curtis lives in San Francisco now, and has made his way up through the ranks of television with impressive efficiency. I was devastated when, after only a few short months of dating, he informed me the week before Valentine's Day that he had taken a job as a News Producer in Toledo, Ohio and he was moving THAT WEEKEND. Leaving me for a job was one thing, but Toledo wasn't even a Top 50 market! I was offended. But Toledo lead to Houston which lead to San Francisco where less than a decade later, he is at the top of his game. For him, a vast improvement over his grubby apartment, cheap McDonald's hamburgers, and occasional sex with me. So much longer later, all is forgiven. He made the right choice.

While Curtis and I exchanged battle scars and quips covering the past year since we last drunkenly encountered each other at the sleazy GayVN after-party in San Francisco, Mike and Zach talked shop about military matters. All the while, several different men at the bar kept trying to nose into the conversations, mostly by practically sexually harassing Laurel. It wasn't until later that I remembered they were just trying to get to Hottie Zach through his female friend. Normally a solid move, but in this case, it just caused Laurel to instantly label them freaks, a moniker from which no sexiness can escape.

Zach and Laurel had to work in the morning, so we tried to make a reasonably early night of it. Greg and company had long since departed and the bar had thinned out like an Obama victory party in New Hampshire. It was time to go. Mike and Curtis and I left the bar, hailed a cab and headed for Grand Central Station. Once there we grabbed some food from a street vendor. Some weeks back, I had enjoyed a $4 lamb gyro there, so Mike and I decided to try to recapture the magic (it didn't) while Curtis who hadn't eaten all day, wolfed down two hot dogs.

I dashed down to the bathroom before we left and I saw someone on the floor inside one of the stalls. At first, I thought they had dropped something or that they were sick, but then I realized, no, it was just some guy getting fucked in the ass at one am in a stall at Grand Central Station. What a way to inaugurate the new East side bathrooms! I told Curtis the story on the train which lead him to tell more than one hair-raising tale of sexual adventure. I think he might have been a little disappointed by my inability to match him, story for story. What can I say? I lead an unadventurous life where I naively assume people only use bathrooms for releasing waste material, think a meal from a street vendor can be magical, and find the ruts in life a comforting sign that you are headed in the right direction.

Meeting Face To Facebook

I have been spending a lot of time on Facebook.com lately. So, MySpace.com, if you are reading this, you know where I have been most nights these past few weeks. I hope you won't be mad. It's not you. It's me.

My first online social love was Friendster.com in 2003 and it was a glorious adventure. Friendster is a dream for stalking people, which is why I link to it so liberally in my blog. It's always the first and easiest place to find anyone you casually bump into at a party or meet at Bowery Bar. I was one of the first gay adopters of Friendster in NYC (Hell, one of the first adopters period -- user number 2876 thank you very much) so I like to think I personally turned it into the server crashing nightmare it was when most everyone I know abandoned it a few months later. I still keep my Friendster profile up and, to a certain degree, running, but it is a little bit like colonial Williamsburg now. A functioning place trapped in the past.

I dabbled a bit in Connexion.org land. The nice thing about Connexion: no straight people! If you saw a cute guy, he was a homo. The downside was that he was probably a Denver homo, but a homo just the same. Connexion seemed mostly to be a quickie Friendster knockoff with a political edge to it. It can also be useful for online stalking, but functionally much less interesting than Friendster. Connexion is basically Friendster's slutty kid sister. Different, younger, faster, but still sharing a LOT of the same DNA.

After the radio show launched, music artists kept raving about MySpace.com. I resisted because it seemed like something for the kids. But guests on the show kept talking about what a great organizing tool it was and how useful in informing fans of upcoming events and new developments. So as a show, we jumped in feet first. We each made profiles and we even created a show profile. When I launched my video podcast, it got a page too! Soon, MySpace became the space for me to wallow in during all my free time. True, I was lax in updating my top eight friends, and any new changes there just caused grumblings from those who got dropped or never were included.

I don't know why MySpace became the rock that everyone's ego shattered on, but such was the case when people didn't rank where they thought they should. I have no patience for this. I was only on there for the show, so why would I highlight friends and family who have no connection to the show at all? It is a skewed perspective on what my life is. A public profile for a public life. But private people didn't always see it that way.

More recently, the invites to join Facebook started coming in droves. As soon as it opened up outside its college core, I had to start avoiding the requests like they were calls from creditors. If MySpace was for the kids, Facebook (in my mind) was for the babies. There was no way in hell I was joining a primarily college network. The offers kept coming and serious friends tried to assure me that it was a place for grown-ups. I wasn't buying it. But then everything changed at the Gay Life Expo.

There was much chatter from Terry Goldman and friends about Facebook. Cast in the Doubting Thomas role, I threw myself into the part body and soul. But Jonathan made me see the light. During the course of our brief conversation I determined that we liked the same TV shows and he was even reading "The Nine," which like the Alexander Hamilton Exhibit at the Natural History Museum in 2005, I had been meaning to check out for weeks but had not gotten around to it. So, with his credibility firmly in place, he persuaded me with the final, crucial piece of information that changed my mind: you can play Scrabble on Facebook.

Now my waking hours are spent cramming QI into triple word scores on Scrabulous and battling Australian high school students on Bogglific. I am practically untouchable at Boggle so it is nice to have an outlet for that since Games.com got so sketchy after 9/11. Scrabble is another matter and I remain ever vulnerable to endless defeat as my romantic side is always lured to the fancy word over the high point score. Story of my life. Go for the joke or the bit instead of the money or ambition. Since Jonathan is the reason I joined Facebook, I spend an enormous amount of time being beaten by him at Scrabulous. Not only does he have a fancy education (you know Johns Hopkins is a good school because they throw in that extra S to confuse and thus weed out the idiots), but he is smarter than I am. He does the Sunday Times Crossword in ink, which I would likely only attempt after a pitcher of mimosas and no will to live.

However, I like to think my quick wit has the upper hand. In between rounds of Scrabble, I spend a lot of time leafing through his many photos looking for snappy photo caption opportunties. A photo of Jonathan smiling from inside an apple tree gets "Lot of fruit in that tree" while a strict rectangular pattern of flowers in a garden is declared "The Tomb of the Unknown Florist." He has a strange habit of being photographed with weird blank expressions where his mouth is hanging open which has led to an unfortunate string of captions related to short buses and the Special Olympics. This is probably all just passive-aggressive misery on my part at being bested constantly on the Scrabble board, but mostly I just amuse myself endlessly. He seems enormously patient while I commit this travesty on his treasured photo memories and I apreciate that.

With all of the applications on Facebook, it is easy to kill thousands of hours in a single day without even noticing. Yes, some of them are mildly irritating (do we really need more than one travelled world map application?) while others are downright bizarre (nevermind, the obvious gay angle to my profile, why does Compare People keep asking me if I would rather marry my sister or my sister-in-law? What kind of choice is that?). My friend Alex Kang just keeps lashing out in all directions on Facebook with status updates that started casually enough ("Alex is thinking he still don't "get" Facebook. What do people do on here besides send vampire bites to one another? Do we not have any thing better to do?"), progressed a bit ("Alex is so bored with this site. And he doesn't want to be bitten by vampires, or given eggs to hatch, or the millions of other pointless stuff on this site.") and now borders on mutiny ("Alex is tired of comparing people, stripper naming and defining himself. Is this ALL there is to Facebook?").

Personally I am willing to judge this Facebook by it's cover. It's a game of modern socialism. A website for people with tons of time of their hands (i.e. college students and adult gay men with high powered careers). None of us have kids of our own, so why not just play in the sandbox a little while longer. Lighten up, Alex. Maybe a few rounds of Scrabble will help balance out your Qi.

See? I am learning something! Johns Hopkins here I come!