Post Natal Trip

Yesterday was my birthday and with my roommate's encouragement, I hastily arranged some happy hour fun at Therapy Bar in midtown. I had a nice turnout, a good cross-section of people I know and mostly never get to see. As any gay party invariably does, it divided quickly into two groups: those asking who my hot friend was and the hot friend in question. Granted, there is always a fair amount of overlap in those situations (hot people asking about other hot people), which is commonly known as a hook-up. Although I don’t think there were any successful hook-ups at my birthday this year. You know me, always keeping the sexual temperature somewhere near a faint simmer.

Me and Adam Sank. Turning up the sexual heat!

Birthday parties are the worst kinds of parties because most of the time you go but the only person you know is the object of the party. And the same is true for everyone else there. So mostly you all spend the evening standing around not talking to the one person you came to talk to and milling around among a cluster of other people with the same mixture of irritation and disappointment on their faces.  Not fun.

Disc Jocular

Turning thirty is a big deal when you're gay. I should know. I've done it enough times.

Tonight was the eve of Stephen Bauer's birthday and he celebrated it by working. Times are tough for Millennials. And the city is lousy with them, like third class passengers swarming the deck of the Titanic now that all the boats are away. You can't stand still for a minute or twice as many will take your seat for half the money.

Lately he has been DJing on Friday nights at Vlada, a familiar vodka repository in Hell's Kitchen. On my most recent visits, the bar has felt less like a gay hot spot and more like a well-kept secret. Uh, me too! Let me tell you: nothing feels better than having the hollow echo of an empty bar mirror your own existence. But in Stephen’s defense, this is my first time there on a night he was working and the crowd was squeezed as tightly around him as the sleeves of his joyously clingy t-shirt.

#FallowFridays

Elmore Leonard is dead. 

That is the kind of spare opener he would have enjoyed. Obviously, I have a very different writing style. But when famous writers die these days, the internet briefly fills with anecdotes and life lessons in a really lovely sort of communal wake. And so it has been the case with Elmore Leonard this week and through that I have picked up a few writing tips that I both never follow and will savagely paraphrase here. My apologies to him on both counts.

Elmore Leonard said never open with the weather, but I don't think he ever had a Friday night like the one we experienced tonight in Manhattan. The air was crisp and clear, with only the barest hint of diaper.  As the immortal bard Taylor Swift once opined, "It feels like a perfect night." And it does.  Normally, in blazing winter and bitter summer, I am a reluctant adventurer. But when the temperature and humidity are just right, like dry bath water, I am not just encouraged to go out but I become the encourager. 

The Two Night Show

Well if you were wondering if it is summer in New York yet. It’s fucking summer. After struggling last weekend to resist the urge to turn the heat back on after the nighttime temperature plunged back down into the 40s, this week has been a parallel struggle to not install the air conditioners. It has been 90 degrees every day for the last three days and now we are supposed to be grateful that this horrible storm from the Midwest (that dropped enough twisters to get Dorothy a dozen round trips between Kansas and OZ) will be the thing that breaks the hot and humid spell that has fallen over the city.

But I can’t complain about the heat (even though that is exactly what this sounds like) because our winter was so arduously long this year that anything, even 90 degree highs, are an improvement. I was commiserating tonight with another New Yorker at a party about the temperature swing but more importantly, the long winter that made everyone I know question our decision to live in this urine soaked wonderland.