Perambulatory

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All About Ass

Fair warning: pics later in this post are decidedly NSFW.

It should be obvious by now that I love ass. I love all the other parts of a man, too, but, especially visually, what I love most is ass. They're best if they're firm and round and full, of course, but even an ass that wouldn't make much of an impression in a pair of jeans can be a lot of fun to play with. If you grab a flat ass with both hands and squeeze, you can create a certain amount of melon-ness that nature neglected to provide.

It's clear to me that nothing accessorizes an ass like a good pair of jeans, but whether an ass is more appealing clothed or unclothed is a question without a definitive answer. Certainly, all those scenes in French movies where a young man at the beach is filmed from behind as he runs toward the water are breathtaking, but the same ass in the right pair of jeans is not necessarily any less so. And it's clear that some asses are better covered than not. While there are certainly fine asses of all ages, as a general rule, time and gravity are not the ass' best friend.

In my last post, I kvetched about bottoms who answer a craigslist ad (especially one of my craigslist ads) with only a pictures of their cocks. A possible explanation was offered: getting an ass pic is harder than getting a cock pic. I maintain that the best way to get a pic of either is to enlist the help of a friend or to rely on the kindness of strangers. But there are alternatives. I could explain, but I think it's better to show you.

You're probably saying that you can only do this shot if you have a large mirror in your bedroom. Not so! Any large mirror will do (most especially if you're not shy). The next time you're in a public restroom or the changing room at your local haberdasher, whip out the cell phone, drop trou, bend forward, and snap! Ten seconds, um, tops.

Or just wait until you're hooking up with a guy who has a mirrored wall (and/or ceiling) and when he heads to the bathroom, seize the moment. If he catches you, maybe he'll help.

Stuck in My Craw

There aren't a lot of things that really bug me. I mean, I'm as ready as the next blogger or gay man to employ rhetorical excess over things that I don't like, but most of those things don't really get on my nerves. I'd say "I don't have pets, and I don't have pet peeves," but I'd kind of like to have a pet, so it would only be true in a very narrow sense.
It is true that I feel a real -- and sometimes intense -- anger when I see scare quotes or the greengrocer's plural, but I recognize that the magnitude of my anger is disproportionate to the stimulus. And I've learned to accept and embrace my prescriptivist nature, so I'm comfortable with the notion that if you routinely use quotes where they don't belong and/or pluralize with the assistance of an apostrophe, then I'm just a better person than you. I still affirm your worth and dignity as a human being, though.
Anyway, my point is, that when I post about things (other than matters of punctuation and usage, that is) that bug me, you have to understand that I'm not really all that worked up over them. With that excessively long proviso, here are some things that bug me.
Bottoms who respond to a craigslist ad with their stats, an affirmation of how much they love sucking cock and being pounded, and pictures of only their cock. Sometimes these responses include statements like "8.5x 5.5 here, but I luv sucking cock and taking dick in my ass," except that they're usually phrased less articulately. You can be as subliterate as you like if I'm going to hook up with you, but if my ad says I'm a top who likes making out, nip play, rimming, and hard-pounding anal sex, why do you think I give a fuck what your cock looks like? Show me your pretty face, your well-chewed nipples, and your firm, round ass. A top who only wants to fuck hung guys is, well, let's just say I don't get it.
Bloggers who don't put their e-mail addresses on their profiles. I sometimes get comments that I would love to answer personally via e-mail but that I can't reply to because there is no e-mail address to be found anywhere on the commenter's blog or profile. Are you afraid of spam? I have my e-mail address on my profile, and I don't get spam from it. If you're really worried about that sort of thing, write your address on a piece of paper, scan it in, and put it on your sidebar as a graphics file. (This is even less of a pet peeve than the others: it's really just a request.)
Attractive men who say that they can't find enough sex. Men, you can find plenty of sex, and it really isn't that difficult. Figure out what you like best to day, and throw up an ad onto your local craigslist. And then have the sex. If you aren't having enough sex, it's not because decent sex is hard to find. It's because you're throwing up barriers. Either you're being too picky about the guys you'll have sex with (Trust me, there is not an area anywhere in this great world of ours that doesn't have a ready supply of hot, willing men. And if there is such an area, you don't live there.) or you're elevating sex into something more than it's meant to be. Sex doesn't always have to be a transforming spiritual experience; sometimes, it can just be fun. And, believe me, having an adequate amount of sex for fun doesn't decrease the probability that at some point you will have sex that's a transforming spiritual experience. You'll just have a lot more fun in the meantime. By the way, the issues surrounding why you're not having more sex are very similar to the issues surrounding why you're still single (and, really, really, I am not trying to be mean here), but that's a post for another time.

Personal Sexual History IV: Falling in Love Again. And Again.

Last (I think) of the series. Some of the pics are very NSFW (and none of them are really relevant to the story, but I didn't want you to get too bored). Sorry about that.

Periods of personal upheaval create fertile ground for emotional entanglement. This is why, for example, adolescents fall in love so often, so deeply, and with such painful results. Coming out later in life (anytime after, say, twenty) is a lot like adolescence. I remember having this exact same conversation with the therapist I saw when I was coming out. When I said that it was a lot like going through adolescence again, she said, "Except that you didn't really go through it the first time." I must have looked terrified when she said that because she quickly followed up with, "But it's a lot easier at thirty-five than at sixteen."

Not so much.

This is a period that isn't a lot of fun to write about because I look back at it now, and I don't think, "Oh, I was so charmingly naive." I think more, "Oh, I was really stupid." At least when I see other people go through the same thing (My friend George, for example, is just recently divorced and falls in love with every cute young guy he meets when he's traveling abroad. And he travels abroad a lot.), I try to be sympathetic. But I also gently try to let them know that their feelings are likely to change a good deal over time. That sounds a lot better than "you're being stupid."

In any case, while the courtship and marriage of my ex had been (with the exception of the really painful ending, which was truly awful and left me with a permanent distrust of the legal profession) an emotionally placid affair, when I started getting emotionally entangled with men, I understood for the first time all the fuss about love.

I fell in love with a man for the first time before I had actually met that man in person. Not long after the ex and I decided that we were headed for a split, I started chatting with a guy in California. Casual chats became less casual and then became phone calls which became long phone calls which became long phone calls with phone sex. Which, by the way, he was really good at. We had a lot in common: he was currently separated and beginning the divorce process, and he had a son still in school. He was about ten years older than me, and he had a much better career at that time (I was still a stay-at-home dad then) than I did, but we could talk about anything, and we understood each other. And we were both very vulnerable.

The whole thing was simultaneously real and unreal. I certainly meant everything I said to him, and when I told him, for the first time, that I loved him (over the phone, you understand), it was a very powerful moment. Fortunately, he was very happy to hear it, and he said it back.

He wasn't however, completely honest with me. He said he was separated, but he was, in fact, still living with his wife, who had no idea that he liked dick. When I first fell for him, I hadn't had any dick (at least not since I was 21 or so), but he'd already been in love with a guy and had had his heart broken.

But I only found out about all that later. I had moved into my own apartment around the beginning of April, and a few weeks later, he was coming to the area for a conference of some sort, so we made plans to get together. Between the time I started talking to him and the time we got together, I'd had sex with one guy, which made me somewhat less nervous. I knew that I liked it even more in practice than I did in theory.

I remember the night he arrived in town pretty clearly. His hotel was way over in Northern Virginia, and I'd given him detailed directions. He called a couple of times on his way over, and I was more and more excited to see him. When he finally knocked on the door, I opened it, grabbed him, pulled him inside and started kissing him. I'd been sucking on an Altoid, and it wound up in his mouth.

Most of the rest of that evening is a blur. I know we wound up in bed pretty quickly, and I know that he was a great kisser, and I know that I fucked him, but I was much too emotionally overwhelmed to chronicle the sexual details. I think it really is true that sex is better with someone when you're in love with him, but I don't think that's true forever. It adds another layer of intensity, but it's an intensity that fades with time.

In any case, I remember spending a lot of time kissing him and exploring his body. And I remember that the next morning, the bed smelled of him, and I liked it.

I found out later that the weekend had been somewhat emotionally uncomfortable for him. I believe that he loved me at the time, but given that he was my first male love interest, my attachment was clearly stronger than his. At some point towards the end of our visit, I got a bit mopey because he was going to go back home soon. He got annoyed with me for hoping that we could have a lasting relationship. "Did you really think I was going to drop my life and move out here? I have a kid in high school." And I was forced to admit that I'd hoped that he would move to be with me when his son graduated, which was only a few months away. I had an amor vincit omni attitude that I have to laugh at from the distance of a few years. Maybe love conquers all when you're twenty-two and have no attachments, but if you're thirty-five (or, in his case, forty-five), you generally have a life that you can't up and leave, no matter how great the other guy is.

Anyway, he was the first guy I ever fucked and the first guy who ever fucked me. (His cock was long, but it wasn't very thick. That was a good thing since the only thing he used for lube was his own precum.) Sometimes I think he'd be amused now to know how small a club of guys he's a member of. We had a mostly terrific time while we were together. We spent a lot of time horizontal and a lot of time talking, and it wasn't easy for either of us to say goodbye.

We continued to talk most every day on the phone for a while after he went back to California, but then he fell in love with a twenty-five year old bartender and waited a month or so to tell me about it. I'd since had sex with a couple of other guys, but I was still very much in love with him, and when he finally told me, I was devastated (I have chosen the word "devastation" carefully. Sure, I recovered, but at the time, it seemed like the emotional equivalent of the Great Flood.) for weeks. I had never understood heartbreak until then. I remember about a week after he'd told me, I went to a movie (Notting Hill, I think, not that I'm anxious to admit that), and when I came out, I realized that it was the first two hours that I hadn't spent moping about the so-called break up. I am still grateful to Julia Roberts.

Anyway, time passed, and I mostly got over it. We kept in touch occasionally. I'd call him about once a month, and he was always glad to talk to me. He'd never call me though: he said that he felt too guilty to initiate a call. About a year later, he was back in town, and I drove over to his hotel room. We talked for a while, and then I fucked him again, and it was awesome. He really was a terrific kisser. Afterwards, I told him, "I think I'll always love you, but I'm way past the point where it can make me crazy." And then I never called him again. I suppose on some level I always will love him, even though I probably think about him no more than twice a year now. It wasn't good for my self-respect to try to maintain a friendship when I was the only one trying, though.



The next time I fell for a guy, I had the sense not to tell him that I loved him right away, so when it fell apart after less than a month, it wasn't quite as awful. I've probably written at least a little bit about Allen, if only because he was the noisiest fuck I've ever had. It was a few months after David (aka Mr. Heartbreak) had fallen for his bartender. I also met Allen online, but at least he lived in Maryland. We chatted a couple of times and then we agreed to meet for an afternoon date. It lasted about eighteen hours.

We met at a bookstore in Bethesda, and then we walked around town. He was a graphic designer, and he showed me things he liked in the pricey home furnishings stores. I am not a visually oriented person, and I've always been attracted to men who are. Then we went to see a movie.

One thing I do remember with some fondness about my early queer days is my long since gone sexual timidity. All in all, it's much better to be sexually bold, but there's a great deal of pleasure to be had when you're not sure of yourself and you're waiting to make your first move. It was a big deal when I held Allen's hand in the movie. And then it was a big deal when he rubbed his thigh against mine. And then it was a big deal when I squeezed his thigh. And then it was a really big deal when we left the movie and I had to drive to an ATM and we made out in the bank parking lot. We stopped when we came up for air and saw a ten-year-old girl ogling us from her car.

We stared at each other over dinner, and then we went back to my place and sat on the couch and chatted for the time it took me to work up to my next move. But once I put my arm around his neck, it was clear where we were headed, though it was so much fun that we took our time getting there. Allen was a small, half-Vietnamese guy, so it was always easy to pull him on top of me to make out with him. Later, we'd sometimes fall asleep in that position, but on the first date, we were too busy making out and feeling each other up. Still, I probably kissed him for a half hour before I even got his shirt off. And it took another half hour to get him to the bed. And another two hours to work his nipples, eat his ass, and fuck him. He screamed through all of those activities, at various volumes, and he screamed again when -- after I'd cum -- I took his very cute, very small, uncut cock in my mouth and worked my tongue between his head and foreskin for about twenty seconds until he shot his equally cute load.

Then we fell asleep together. The next morning, I fucked him again and made him breakfast. Then he went home for a while, but we got together again in the afternoon. He was trying to sell his apartment and was having an open house. We'd sit on the couch and make out between visits from prospective buyers.

From the beginning, Allen was ambivalent. He seemed very into me, but he was also very cautious. My guess (and it doesn't really matter whether I'm right about this) is that he's a guy who's not very comfortable with guys who treat him too kindly. He told me, for example, that he'd never had breakfast in bed, so one weekend when he was over, I made him breakfast in bed. He told me that he'd never been on a picnic (How is that possible? He was thirty-two.), so I packed a picnic and took him down to a state park on the Chesapeake Bay. It was either before or after the main season, so it was pretty deserted there, and we made out on the beach. Then we took a hike and made out in the woods. He seemed to appreciate both of those gestures, but they also seemed to alienate him from me.

I suspect, though, that we were just too different to get along. I was a fairly butch guy with kids, and he was a cute young thing who wore three-quarter length pants and flip flops. I met him for lunch one weekday, and he said something about people at work maybe knowing he was gay, and I said, "Oh, Allen. Everybody who meets you knows you're gay." He didn't seem to appreciate that, but I liked him the way he was, and I liked that we were different. I liked the fact that he was feminine in a sweet way. The sex was always awesome, but I don't think he could, for example, see me hanging out with his friends.

Whatever. We'd been going out for a few weeks, seeing each other a lot, when he canceled a date and then told me, over the phone, that he wanted to see other people as well as me. When I said, "Okay," he said, "I was sure you wouldn't agree to that." I told him that was a pretty cowardly way to break up with someone, and he said, "I'm not a brave person." I never saw him again.


The next time I told a guy that I loved him, I didn't really mean it. He said the same thing back to me, and he didn't really mean it, either. He lived in Pennsylvania (75 miles away), so it was difficult to see him other than on weekends. Plus, he was a dick. One weekend before I was due in court for an important custody hearing, he canceled our plans so that he could go to San Francisco and meet a twenty-four year old student he'd been chatting with online. He said, "I got through my divorce without any help; you can, too." Amazingly, he didn't see any reason why this behavior should mean that he and I should no longer be an item. I told him to go away, and he was annoyed.

He wasn't that good in the sack, either. When we started seeing each other, he was a top. Midway through our dating time, he was a versatile top, and by the time I'd ended it, he was just versatile, but in none of those positions was he a good kisser. The best part about sex with him was that he'd had a vasectomy when he was married, and as a result, he had more precum than anyone I've ever known. I could get the front of his jeans totally soaked just from making out and foreplay. Still, he was a dick. I don't remember his name.

When that pseudo-relationship ended, it wasn't painful at all because I'd been the one to end it and because he'd been a dick. At that point, I thought I was beyond being crazy over a guy, but I was mistaken.


I was on gay.com one night when a young'un (he said he was twenty-six, though it later turned out he was thirty-two) started chatting me up. He was very confrontational, saying something like, "If you're such a nice guy, what are you doing on gay.com?" We started chatting, and it was another one of those situations where you can talk to a guy for hours and hours without ever running out of things to say. He was from South Carolina, though, so I didn't think anything of it until he told me that he was in the Coast Guard and that he'd likely be stationed in DC after he finished his MBA in one more semester. Hmmmmm.

And then we started talking on the phone. Every night. For hours. He was fun, sympathetic, and wickedly intelligent, if in a somewhat unconventional way. We were starting to get serious without ever having met each other. This, by the way, is never a good idea. Even if it turns out well, it's not a good idea to date outside your own area code. I knew enough from my experience with David not to take it too far, but after a month or so, he made plans to come up to Maryland to spend the weekend. He had some other friends in the area, and he was going to stay with them on some nights and me on others.

Emile may have been the most beautiful man I ever met. He was half-Japanese and half-Irish, and he spent a lot of time in the gym. He had the body of a model (including the fact that he shaved off most of his body hair), and he was extraordinarily cute. All of which was kind of wasted on me. I recognized just how pretty he was (only after we met, though; because he was active duty, he wouldn't send me a picture), but pretty isn't what makes my motor run. I was very excited by his character and his energy and his intelligence, though, and by the time we met, I was halfway to being in love with him. He was attracted by the fact that I was a father, which is not something one finds all that often in a single gay man of thirty-two.

He was also, alas, on the rebound from a relationship that, apparently, terminated when he and his boyfriend were getting ready to move to a new condominium. Emile moved, and his boyfriend moved somewhere else, kind of without telling Emile in advance. Oops.

Emile and I had tremendous intellectual rapport, but when we went to bed, it just didn't work. I tried, and he tried, but, well, it just didn't work. We made out for a while, and that seemed fine. I worked his nipples for a while, and that seemed fine. I got my fingers inside his ass, and he pushed me out (he told me later it was because my fingers almost made him cum right away, but I didn't know that then). I told him I wanted to fuck him, and he said okay, but again, he started to shake and moan as soon as I got inside him, and then he told me to stop (for the same reason, though, again, I didn't know that). And then he just sort of shut down, sexually. I tried to make out with him some more, but he withdrew.


At that point, I just figured it was a bad first try, and that we could try again after a decent night's sleep. But then I woke up around 4 am, and the bed was empty. The apartment was empty, too. There was a long note from Emile explaining that he had to leave and the he couldn't be my boyfriend.

After that, things got kind of messy. We'd already made plans for him to come to dinner on another night and meet two friends of mine who were a couple. (I'd done that because he'd told me that when he and his boyfriend had broken up, it was as if no one had ever known they'd been a couple, even though they'd lived together for two years. Of course, he later told me that during the two years they'd lived together, he'd never told his boyfriend that he loved him, so, in retrospect, I can see that he had some issues.) So he came over, and we had dinner (I was so distraught that I completely overcooked the pork, leading me to form one of my most important aphorisms: "No man is worth overcooked meat."), and we played cards, and we had a really terrific time. And then when my friends were gone, we talked for a long time, with me trying to persuade him that he'd made his decision too quickly. It didn't work. After he went back to South Carolina, though, he seemed to be having a change of heart. He said that he wanted to remain friends and to see what might happen when he came to DC. But then he stopped returning my calls, and I'm afraid I may have become one of those guys who leaves six messages on someone's voicemail in a single evening because the other guy said he was going to call and didn't. Yeah, I was pretty far gone. Finally, he told me not to call him again, so I didn't.

And, you know, when it was finally over, I was sad, but I was also kind of relieved. It seemed to mark the end of my second adolescence, and after that, I was a lot more able to interact with guys without letting my emotions make me do stupid things. It felt good to get back to being an adult again.

I think the whole period was something that couldn't be avoided. I remember talking with David about the experience in general terms, and he said it had been the same for him. "It's like your brain is sitting on a shelf, and it can see what you're doing, and it knows what you're doing is wrong and not helpful, but it's powerless to stop you from making the wrong moves."

Anyway, that was pretty much it for falling in love until b&c came along. And his and my love is a much more mature phenomenon. Some people might say that it's also more distant, but I think that's a necessary function of maturity. It's not so much that I set out to get into a relationship that was less intense. It's more that I became my own complete person so that I no longer needed someone else to make me whole. It's two complete people co-existing in an emotionally attached way rather than two incomplete people combining to form one unit.

I think they're two fundamentally different models for love, though it can be argued that there's a continuum and every relationship falls somewhere along that continuum. I also think it's an open question which alternative is better. It's likely that what's better differs by individual. It's also likely that what you end up with is somewhat a function of random chance. If you're an incomplete person (let's call you a free radical) and you run into another free radical, then you end up with one type. If you're happy as your own man, and you hook up with another guy who's the same way, you end up with the other type. (Since people are more or less dependent at different times of their lives, it's largely a matter of when you meet the guy you fall in love with.) If one of you is dependent and the other isn't, then you end up with a world of trouble. I think it's also clear that which kind of person you are and which type of relationship you end up has profound implications for your sexual behavior. My emotional independence is certainly a big factor in why I so easily have sex with a lot of different guys without suffering much hurt in the process.

But, of course, none of these theories is testable, and I'm just making it up as I go along. Which isn't to say that I don't believe it. I do. Anyway, for me, it's pretty clear that I never again want to be so emotionally dependent on a guy that I feel like I might not survive if we were no longer together. Because, really, nothing lasts forever, and unless b&c and I perish together in a plane crash (increasingly unlikely, given the cost of airfare and the weakness of the dollar), one of us is bound to be alone again, sooner or later.

And, really, no man is worth overcooked meat.

Another Post Without Smut

Our ever expanding language

Kids these days have a word for everything. I was talking with EFU on the phone yesterday, and I asked her how things were socially. She said they were pretty good, but that so many people there were hooking up that sometimes there weren't many people around just to hang out with. Then she said, "I was sexiled four times last week." I had not heard the term before, but apparently it's quite common. In any case, I'm sure you can guess what it is. It's the equivalent of the old necktie on the dorm room door. If one of your roommates is hooking up with his (or in this case, her) girlfriend (or in this case, girlfriend), you can't go in the room to get your stuff because you're sexiled. Apparently, one of EFU's roommate's girlfriend is at a college a couple of hours away and drove up to visit EFU's roommate and "they went at it all the time last weekend." I was going to tell her that since they're lesbians, they'll stop having sex within about six weeks, but I didn't want to be mean.

EFU has already joined her campus' GLBT activism group. I have tried to explain to her that if she wants to meet straight guys, she's probably hanging out in the wrong place, but I'm glad that she has a strong sense of social justice, of course. Anyway, I'm probably fifteen years away from wanting grandchildren, so there's no hurry.

Speaking of neckties, most of us no longer need to hang them on dorm room doors or around our necks for work, but nothing works better than old neckties for securing a man to your bed. They're more comfortable and easier to work with than rope, and the silk is very sexy. And if you're working in a room with dim lighting, no one will see any stains. Or notice your questionable taste in neckwear. Paisley? Dude. Many of us have gotten rid of our old neckties except for the ones we still wear on the rare occasion when we need them, but used ones are available cheaply and in abundance at second hand stores. Or you can just appropriate your partner's, like I do. Lawyers, obviously, will not have this problem.

Yet another example of why I never get anything done

I got a pack of m&ms from the vending machine the other day, and there were only three reds. There were eighteen oranges. There were also many blues but very few dark browns.

I think a lot about m&m color distribution. I was not really aware of what was going on when red m&ms were pulled from the market (1976), but I certainly remember them coming back in 1987. Around that time, I read an article -- probably in the Boston Globe -- about the color distribution of m&ms. At that time, m&ms were red, yellow, green, brown, and tan, and there were more browns than any other color. Orange came in when red left. I didn't mind orange, but I was appalled when there was that voting madness in the early nineties to determine the new color to be added. Over time, I have grudgingly come to accept blue m&ms, but I usually eat them first so that I don't have to look at them. Then I eat the orange ones because I don't much like orange.

I'm not sure when they ditched the tan m&ms, but I approve of their removal. All in all, though, the history of m&ms is a sordid one. One thing the Internet is really good at is destroying the notion of an original idea. A lot of other people have already spent a lot of time considering m&m color distribution. And with considerably more rigor than I have employed. Back around 1999 or 2000, though, I did keep a spreadsheet to track the color distribution in bags of peanut m&ms. I had tracked about fifty bags before I gave up. I don't usually admit this because my official position is that peanut m&ms are an abomination.

I always separate my m&ms into piles by color, but I don't always eat the colors in the same order. It depends a lot on my mood. Sort of like the way Tyrone Slothrop picks the colors representing his hookups in Gravity's Rainbow. By the way, I've tried three times to read Gravity's Rainbow, but I've never finished it. I'm not happy about that, but I figure I can try again. There is a great deal of sexual variety written about in GR, so I reckon it's good research. I'm not going to start color coding my hookups, though. That's just too complicated for me.

(By the way, and à propos of nothing, when I was in college, I worked with a young woman who claimed that the different colors of m&ms had slightly different flavors and that she could tell which color she was tasting without looking. We got a blindfold and tested her abilities. She was mistaken.)

I thought that finding such a small number of red m&ms must be an anomaly, so I got another package, and I found a similar distribution. That's when I began to worry.

I have a spreadsheet that I use for things like my budget and my various savings/retirement accounts. I used to use it to track my consumer debt, but then I paid off all the debt. I have a car loan now, but it's too simple to bother tracking on the spreadsheet. I added a page to the spreadsheet to begin tracking m&ms. But I didn't record the numbers from the bag that concerned me, and after just one more bag, the plain m&ms disappeared from the vending machine. Clearly, there's something that M&M Mars doesn't want me to uncover.

By the way, when the consumer affairs people at M&M Mars refer to m&ms, they use capitals, a greengrocer's plural, and quotation marks, so that it looks like

"M&M's"

I do not approve of the capitalization, the greengrocer's plural, or the quotation marks. But it's their candy, so I suppose they can write it anyway they want. Motherfuckers.

Anyway, it's no secret that there's an all out attack on masculinity these days, and the new distribution (the one additional data point that I got confirms my initial analysis; clearly, two data points are not enough to allow generalization, but the available data argues in favor of a distribution of 30-20-20-10-10-10 for orange, blue, yellow, red, green, and brown, respectively) of m&ms is yet another example. In times past, dark brown -- a traditionally masculine color -- was always the most prevalent color, but now it is almost an afterthought. Red -- the color of sexual aggression -- has undergone a similar reduction. While it's true that blue is the color most likely to be a man's favorite color, it's also true that blue is a color that calms you down.

Back in the day, when I was first hooking up with guys, I had more than my share of condom issues. I have since gotten over them, but one of the ways that I used to prepare for a hookup was to eat some chocolate. The combination of sugar and theobromine is a good one for someone with condom anxiety. And even if you don't have condom anxiety, it's good for your intermediate-term stamina. If I'm going to be eating some chocolate, why the hell do I want to be calmed down? (Full disclosure: I will eat a bag of m&ms before a hookup in a pinch, but dark chocolate is a far better choice. The darker, the better. There are now dark chocolate m&ms, but I haven't tried them. Or if I have, I don't remember.)

Anyway, the worst offender here is clearly the increased preponderance of orange. Orange is the color men hate most. Putting thirty percent orange m&ms in a bag is akin to saying, "We spit on your masculinity. Why don't you marry a dominatrix and buy her a strap on so that she can skewer you like a roast pig?"

I would boycott m&ms over this horrific situation, but I feel like I have a responsibility to guys everywhere to continue to monitor the situation. Perhaps the next time I'm at Costco, I'll get one of the 54-ounce bags (because a two-pounder just wouldn't be enough, obviously) and do a count on a larger scale. Knowledge is power.

ALSTTYO - NSFW

Work is kicking my ass today, and it's likely that it'll continue to kick my ass for the rest of the week. So here's a little smut to tide you over. It's a hookup that actually happened, but I'm thinking of writing my experiences in a more pornographic style. Not including the inevitable asides, tangents, and digressions, of course. You can let me know what you think. Also, be warned, there are some fully NSFW pics below.
Last Tuesday night was my last night as a de facto single. Some people would say that I'm de facto single all the time, but it's really not practical to be hooking up all the time when your partner's at home. He may tell you that he wouldn't mind being kicked out of the house occasionally so that you can have a friend over for a play date, but he's only saying that because he knows you won't follow through, so he gets credit with no chance of having to pay up. If you actually kicked him out of the house so that you could play (which, in addition to everything else, is rude), there would be repercussions. Testiness, bitchiness, moping, and, the ne plus ultra of passive aggression, the late night e-mail. That's the one where he can't tell you that he's annoyed with you because he doesn't have a good reason for being annoyed with you, but he's still annoyed with you, so late one night when he should know better, he sends you the e-mail about how you're an awful person for doing the exact same things that he does and the things that you've agreed that you could do. Ugh, ugh, ugh. I've gotten about three of these missives in the past four years, and each time, I start to look at real estate listings. I used to write back and tell b&c what a douchebag he was for sending me the e-mail, but I just ignored the last one. He was whinging at me for not staying home and having sex with him when I'd gone out to meet a friend (a friend without privileges, mind you) for coffee. And we'd had sex twice already that weekend. It is occasionally difficult for a person (like me) with a northern European temperament to co-exist peacefully with a person (like b&c) with a southern European temperament. Fortunately, I have trained him not to say things like "if you don't like it, you can all just move out!" around the children. Especially since "it" is usually something like the way he makes zucchini. And, frankly, he's a pretty good cook, but his zucchini is not so great. He slices it too thickly, and the inside gets kind of mushy. I still eat it, but the kids don't, and I have a hard time encouraging (let alone requiring) them to eat something that a) most kids hate and b) sucks.
Anyway, last Tuesday night, I'd had one hookup, and I probably already wrote about it (it takes only a week for anything that wasn't at least a strong two-star hookup to fade so that the memory of exactly what I did to whom becomes jumbled), and there was a second guy, an African American graduate student (over thirty, though, I'm pretty sure) from Adams Morgan who was all excited about my cock. I'd talked with him on the phone, and he was a little bit, well, queeny, but I don't have a problem with queeny/effeminate/nelly/whatever as long as the guy kisses well and is an eager bottom. Guys like that have a tendency to talk too much (and to say the same things over and over), but it's not like you don't have ways to keep their mouths, busy, right?
Anyway. The guy shows up. Like always, I close the door behind him, grab him, and start to kiss him. He starts right away with the excessive commentary, "Oh, you're so hot; I know we're going to get along just fine," and I kiss him some more because that's the primary way of shutting him up. I push him upstairs, by the ass, and I toss him on the bed and jump right back on top of him. Big lips, good kisser. He's reaching for my shorts and my cock right away, but I'm not having it yet. I pin his wrists up over his head, straddle him, and start to kiss him some more. Then onto the nipples. He's thrusting up, trying to feel my cock against his, and, really, that's pretty easy by now because between the lips and the nips, I'm hardwood. Maybe maple or walnut. I'm not sure. I didn't actually stop at this point to answer the age old if-I-were-a-tree-what-tree-would-I-be question just then. I had to keep going back to kiss him to keep him quiet.
I get to working pretty hard on the nips. Sometimes I escalate by gradually increasing both the distance between my teeth when I bite down and the force with which I bite down. A sub like this guy will have a really hard time telling me no unless I get to an extreme level, so I don't go there, but I go where he's not much used to being since that leads to the sort of inarticulate moaning and groaning that is so much better than him telling me yet again how hot I'm making him.
Anyway, after a while, I decide to let him go down on me (am I generous, or what?), and he takes off my shorts and my boxer briefs and starts to tell me how much he likes my cock, which means that I have to grab his head and push it down. This guy's got pretty mad oral skills, so he can take the cock and continue to sing its praises at the same time. And I don't mind that because a) I can't understand what he's saying, and b) I'm getting a great blowjob. I lie back and wrap my legs around the back of his head so I can push down whenever he decides to get loquacious. And we do that for a while before I decide that I need to eat his ass. He's promised that it'll be very clean, and he hasn't lied. I switch between sticking my tongue into his hole and biting the insides of the backs of his thighs. He reacts differently to the two stimuli, but he seems to like them both a whole lot.
I'm having a pretty hot time, and it's been going for a while when he starts begging me to fuck him. I give in, and he starts to jump on my cock, so I hand him a condom. He seems a little put out by the condom requirement, but the ad says "safe only," and I figure that while he's sitting on my cock, he's going to be yammering away, and unsafe sex is just too much to take when you're already taking inane sex talk.
So it takes a while to get me inside him, and all that while he's going on about how thick my cock is, and I'm thinking that he's probably had thicker, and that he should just sit on down, but I don't want to be a dick and force him, so I hold off for as long as I can before I grab his hips and pull him down. He doesn't like it, but he likes it. I let him bounce up and down for a while, and then I lower him back into X position, but it's the sort of thing that he can't appreciate at all. So I pull him back up and let him bounce again, and he starts begging for doggy. Every time he pulls off me, I have to grab the rubber and push it back on my cock. He does have a pretty tight ass, after all.
Doggy position usually doesn't work well for me. I think it's because my legs are short compared to the rest of my body. But if I modify doggy so that I'm on one knee and have the other knee bent so that the other foot is on the bed, sort of half kneeling, I can give it to him pretty hard. He's used to my cock now, so he wants it really hard. We've been fucking for a while when I push him down onto his stomach and start pounding into him from that position. It takes a long time, but I eventually get really close. I pull out, get rid of the condom, and shoot my load up his spine. There's a big puddle of it in the small of my back. I pull out and wipe myself off and him off before he can roll over onto his back. He starts to suck on my cock some more while he jerks himself off. I surprise myself by staying hard. He cums, we both recover, and we chat some. The sex seems to have driven some of the queeny out of him, and he was really terrific in the sack, but it's one o'clock by then, and I'm glad when he says it's time to go.

No Day But Today

So b&c got back from Germany late Wednesday night (Except that he'd apparently gotten a bit bored in Germany, so he'd detoured for a few days in Athens and a few more in Mykonos, just because he could, you know? And he's all, "I've got to take you to Mykonos sometime," and I'm all, "I'll go pack," and he's all, "No, seriously, once you've been there, you won't understand any of the fuss about Rehoboth," and I'm all, "Dude, when have I ever said anything nice about Rehoboth? Have you been doing Sambuca shots on the airplane again?"), which meant, of course, that we had tickets to the Kennedy Center on Thursday. Naturally, I assumed this meant Kathy Griffin¹, but, no, b&c ("Who's Kathy Griffin?") had gotten us tickets to see the opera.

So, yeah, they were doing Rent. Except -- and I HATE it when they fuck with the classics -- they weren't calling it Rent. Instead, they had made a bunch of changes, and the new name was The Hippie Chick. Except -- and I HATE it when people glorify the use of foreign languages -- The Hippie Chick is apparently not a fancy enough title for the gray/blue hairs who go to the opera, so they had to put the whole thing in Italian. La Bohème, or whatever. They rewrote a lot of the music, too. Again with the influence of the blue/gray hairs: it sounded like fucking Puccini.

Oh, and get this: Maureen? NOT A DYKE! They were calling her Musetta and she was all about the dick. The girl didn't quite sparkle on her highest notes, but otherwise, I gotta admit she was working it. And major props to all the other singers. Every one of the male leads was in good voice (and they were all very shaggable: I wanted to scream out, "Marcello! Stop being Maureen's bitch and come be mine!" but they frown on that sort of thing in the Kennedy Center, except at the Kathy Griffin show, I reckon), especially Rodolfo (and you know how I hate to compliment tenors). The chick playing Mimi was terrific, and the chemistry between the leads was very compelling. I actually cried when

Oh. Get this. They killed Mimi! Those bastards! I was sitting there, waiting for her to revive and say that Angel (there was NO Angel in this production, but there were plenty of drag queens in the second act, at least) had told her to go on back to Roger Rodolfo, but he just starts screaming, and then the curtain comes down and everybody's all clapping and shit. And then they're yelling, "Bravo," and I'm all, "Bitches, Kathy Griffin is NEXT DOOR, and I'm not even sure Bravo's picked her up for another season. You don't think they're going to give a reality show to some Italian tenor, do you?" I hate it when people are clueless about the arts.

Anyway, it was all very well done, and we were even out of there in less than 2.5 hours (only one intermission! hooray!) but I was pissed at them for pissing on Rent that way. At least they got the setting (urban loft, late twentieth century) right, but they totally gutted the HIV angle. Hell, the way they went on about coughing, Mimi might just as easily have had tuberculosis.

When we came back from intermission, the guy behind me was talking to his beard girlfriend and saying something like "I don't like it when they try to contemporize things like this. Something is always lost." I was sure that I'd found a kindred spirit, but when I whipped out my lighter, said, "Amen, brother!" and started singing "five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes," he just looked away, and the ushers seemed unhappy. I guess they didn't want me reminding the crowd what it's really supposed to sound like.


¹Full disclosure. I don't think Kathy Griffin's all that funny, most of the time. I do think her discussion of Jesus in her Emmy acceptance speech was brilliant, however. There were many fewer gay boys than usual at the opera last night, but there were tons of them in the Kennedy Center lobby afterwards. I didn't look at everybody, but I'm pretty sure the guy with the "I SHAVED MY NUTS FOR THIS?" t-shirt was coming out of the Kathy Griffin show rather than from La Bohème.

The Nose on Your Face

Tuesday evening, while I was waiting for my second hookup to arrive, I was hanging out on gay.com. I saw Brad, my friend and occasional massage subject, so I said hello and asked him how he was doing:

Brad: Oh, there's been a lot of drama. My ex wants to move to DC, and he asked me whether I mind if he moves here.
Ted: Doesn't your ex live in Baltimore? What's the big difference? Or is this another ex.
Brad: Another ex. Ex #1 lives in Baltimore. Ex #2 lives in Florida and wants to move to Falls Church.
Ted: Oh, Virginia. Just tell him you don't care.
Brad: I told him not to consider me in the decision. But if he moves here he wants to be friends again. I've gotten to the point where I can see him with his current partner and not be ill, but I don't know about close friends.
Ted: Well, what do you want? You're allowed not to want to be friends with him.
Brad: Really?
Ted: DC's a reasonably big town, and there's no reason you ever need to go to Virginia. Just tell him to avoid you. Hell, you're like ten feet tall. He can see you from three miles away and just go in a different direction.
Brad: LOL. Good point. I think I could handle seeing him once in a while, but I don't want to hang out with him. He's still smoking hot, and I have to work hard not to have unpure thoughts when I'm around him.
Ted: Oh, that makes it much easier. Just have an affair with him.
Brad: ?
Ted: If you fuck him, he probably won't want to see you again, in which case you get what you want. Or he'll want to have sex with you on a regular basis, in which case you get what you want. I believe it's what they call a win-win.
Brad: So I'd get sex, but we wouldn't have to be friends.
Ted: Right. It's a safe bet that if he has a partner and he's fucking around with you, he'll want to avoid spending any time with you where you aren't both horizontal. Unless you like to do it standing up, but your ceilings aren't that high, are they?
Brad: LOL.
Ted: Anyway, it's the obvious solution.
Brad: I would never have thought of that, but it kind of makes sense. Thanks!
Ted: You can always count on me to get in touch with your inner slut. Speaking of that, I better get offline. My next hookup should be here pretty soon.
Brad: Have fun!
Ted: I always do.

I don't know what people would do with me to instruct them. How could he not have thought of that himself? More depressing than his inability to conceive the obvious solution is his likely inability to carry it out. I'm pretty soon that before long I'll be hearing about how he's spending more time with his ex, wishing that he weren't, and not even getting laid in the bargain. Most guys create their own unhappiness.

Reading the Signs

So y'all know I don't have all that much sex, right? I don't mean that I make things up. If I write about sex on the blog, then it's sex I actually did have. And I have sex with b&c that I don't bother to write about on the blog. But still, it's not all that much sex. All the other gay bloggers have much more sex than I do: they just have a corresponding degree of subtlety and restraint that I don't. Also, a better way with euphemisms. So when someone says something like "I took Rhonda out to do some grocery shopping," what he really means is "You remember that guy who likes me to call him 'Rhonda'? I fucked him again yesterday. Twice. The second time around, I used a tube of Jimmy Dean sausage. Then I went home and made the other half whole. Twice." Or when someone says, "I could blog about a horrible tennis defeat to the Office Guy. But no ... you guys don't want to read about it," what he really means is "I suppose I could write about how I ran into my co-worker in the men's room and he hauled me into a stall and spanked my ass before he fucked it. Twice. But I have too much class for that: I'm not TED, after all. Thank God. Twice."

In a similar vein, a few days ago, I had a brief e-mail exchange with a blogger whom I'd inadvertently been a dick to. Only a little bit of a dick, but you know, there are enough people out there who take great pleasure in being a huge dick that I shoot for not being a dick at all, to help provide a little bit of balance. And when I fail, then I try to apologize for being a dick. While writing this paragraph, I'm struck with the notion that somewhere there may be a language where the same word is used for both "to be" and "to have," and if there's some program that translates blogs into that language, there are some bewildered foreign readers out there thinking that I strive very hard not to have a dick. I apologize to my cherished notional foreign readers for any confusion I may have caused. I hope you don't think I was being a dick.

Anyway, in the course of this exchange, I complimented this blogger's blog, and because he is compulsively polite, he complimented my blog and told me that he was envious of my sex life. He further stated that he didn't have as good a sex life as mine because he was either too lazy or too neurotic, most likely too neurotic. I was going to write back and thank him for his kind words, but I couldn't decide whether to call him on the obvious lie about not having as much sex as I do. In the end, I decided not to write back at all because I didn't want to waste any more of his time. I was pretty sure, after all, that right after sending me the e-mail, he had gone to his office's break room with the copy boy, whom he proceeded to fuck. Twice.

My schedule precludes hooking up most of the time. It's true that I can accept a blowjob or let a guy ride my cock while I'm sleeping, but that can be considered rude. Besides, I can't set up the session while I'm asleep, so hooking up when I'm sleeping is pretty much out of the question. I work in a fairly conservative field, so hooking up while I'm working (and I work a lot) is decidedly frowned upon. I can't hook up when YFU is over, and I can't hook up while I'm having sex with b&c. Given all of those limitations and given the fact that every other gay blogger is having sex all the time, is it surprising that when I have a free moment or evening, I'd want to have some fun? Twice?

So, yeah, I hooked up twice Monday night, and I hooked up twice again last night. But I only hooked up twice over the weekend (I had to go to the office and finish up some work. I did also have a very good time giving an erotic massage on Sunday, but I really can't write much about it because the guy I gave the massage to is the only one of my blog readers -- so far as I know -- whose penis I ever get to touch. He doesn't like it when I discuss what we did in much detail, so I will only say that it was very good to have him on the table. He's been playing a lot of tennis all summer, and it shows on his body. Sadly, he's straight. He might say he's bi, but on his very best day, he's no more than a Kinsey two. What a waste of hot man flesh, but I suppose we have to let the women have something, more's the pity.), which makes a grand total of six hookups in five days, which is about as close as you can come to having no sex at all without being this guy.

Anyway, I was working until about seven last night, so just before I left, I posted a CL ad, figuring that there'd be some responses by the time I got home. The first promising one came from a deaf guy in Montgomery Village. He wanted to host. MV isn't far away, and I figured traveling would mean one less load of laundry, so I overcame my aversion to MV (it's the sort of place where if you park in the wrong space, you subject yourself to instantaneous tazering earnest lectures from Concerned Citizens) and headed off. After a few e-mails back and forth, of course. The guy was into most of what I was into (he loved kissing, loved being rimmed, and was versatile), but he wanted to make sure that I didn't have a problem with deaf guys.

A problem with deaf guys? As if! I was all, hey, I read Durban Bud, and I know that TJ (in a rare moment of honest disclosure about his sex life) claims to have fucked every deaf guy he met over a period of some years. So I hopped in the shower, then I surfed over to DB. I wanted to be able to say "nice to fuck you" and "nice to meet you"when this guy and I were done. TJ's instructions weren't very precise, alas, but I'd already said I'd go, and, well, sex, you know?

Dan had said in his last e-mail that he'd leave the door open for me. I love that. It's really hot to go to a man's place, open his door, walk in, and find him on the bed, naked and horny. But, of course, this was a hookup in Montgomery Village, so I found him in the foyer, dressed (he was even wearing crocs: ugh), and holding a guest parking pass. He told me (he spoke very clearly) that he needed to come with me to make sure that I had parked in the right space because "they're very strict about parking here." I'm pretty flexible about a guy's fantasies, but I do think that using parking regulations as a means of foreplay is some pretty weird shit.

Anyway, after all that was sorted out, we went back into his apartment and into his bedroom where he proceeded to undress with almost alarming alacrity. We'd been kissing all the way from the front door to the bed, and I pushed him down and started to kiss him some more. He was a pretty good -- and eager -- kisser. He had a sharp lower tooth that caught my lower lip a few times, but nobody's perfect. I guess we were rolling around on the bed a bit because a couple of minutes later, he somehow back somersaulted off the bed and onto the floor. I think it was accidental, but you never know. He jumped up, told me he was find and got back on the bed, on his stomach and looked at me expectantly. I think he wanted the tongue in the ass right away.

I, however, was not in so much of a hurry, and I figured that if he wanted my tongue in his ass, he could put my cock in his mouth, so I rolled him onto his side, lay next to him, and resumed kissing, followed soon thereafter by some fairly mild nipple play. Not long after that, he decided that he did want to suck my cock after all. He was pretty good at that, too, and the sharp tooth was, happily, nowhere in evidence. After a minute or so of lying back and enjoying, I pulled his ass around and started to give him the treatment. He was a very quiet guy generally, and the first noise I got out of him was a soft moan after my tongue had been around and in his ass for a few minutes. I spent some time on the nuts, but mostly it was just a prolonged rim job.

I tried some finger work on the ass, but it was really tight. My guess is that when he said he was versatile, he really meant "I don't have anal sex, but I don't give and don't receive pretty much equally." Anyway, I was pretty sure he was too tight for my cock, so after a while, I put him on his back again, and I kissed him while he jerked off. When he came, we'd only been playing slightly more than half an hour, but it was already 9:30, and I figured I could use a good night's sleep, so I got dressed and left. He followed me to retrieve the parking pass (kinky!), and thanked me. I smiled and once again cursed TJ's lack of specific instruction.

It was a solid one-star hookup. Fun and pleasant, but not the sort of thing you'd go out of your way to repeat. The second hookup of the evening was considerably better, but it'll wait for another entry. YFU is over tonight, and b&c is due back from Germany late, so there'll be less extracurricular sex around here in the near future, so I have to ration my recent experiences, especially the ones that were the most fun. There are three or four that I haven't written about yet, so there's still plenty of smut left in reserve.

Or maybe I'll just post the cookie recipe.

Humbled

I've noticed that my cultural memory is far from infallible. I will be convinced that a certain lyric or bit of movie dialogue goes a certain way only to find later that the detail I remember so vividly is only substantially correct. In other words, I've got the meaning right, but my mind has somehow rephrased. I mention this because it was a long time ago when I saw The Good Earth. (It was released in 1937, so I must have seen it on TV.) Anyway, one of the scenes I remember in perhaps incorrect detail involves the two main characters carrying their eldest son around, shortly after his birth. They are remarking about what a fine boy he is when it occurs to them that the gods might overhear them and punish them for their arrogance, so they start talking about how the baby is pockmarked and "only a girl child" or something like that. In any case, the movie portrays a general belief, apparently held by early twentieth century Chinese peasants, that pride goeth before a fall. The Biblical version (Proverbs 16:18) is "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall." I have no real opinion about the correctness of this sentiment, though it seems likely enough, given the existence of gravity. I am less sure about the following verse: "Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud." I don't see why you can't be of an humble spirit while dividing the spoil, and even if I were to grant the implied premise that you have to choose one or the other, I'm not sure that poor-but-humble is what I'd choose. And, given the vehicular choices of most of the Bible thumpers I know, I'm not sure they would either.

Anyway, the reason I was thinking about all of that is that last night I had had a nice two-star hookup (a separate entry about that later, and hopefully another about the other nice two-star hookup that I had on Saturday) and had just finished writing and posting my last entry -- about Friday night and about what terrific sex I've been having lately -- when my second hookup of the evening showed up and rained on my parade (you are not meant to take my metaphor too literally: I have never been able to get into water sports).

The TED hookup rating system rests on the principle that bad sex can be avoided. When it can't be avoided, you push it out of your mind so that it never happened. I am, alas, committed to the idea that the blog should be a relatively accurate chronicle of my sex life, so I reckon I'll talk about the bad sex now and push it out of my mind tomorrow.

I've been pretty careful with my ads. I always ask for "a bottom who likes to kiss," and then I screen out anyone who doesn't volunteer that he likes to kiss or doesn't respond with some enthusiasm when I specifically ask. This guy had said that he wanted to sit on my cock, but he had also said he liked kissing. But I knew I was in for a less-than-stellar session as soon as I grabbed the guy. When I kissed him, there was no there there: he was moving his lips, but there was no passion coming out. Still, he wasn't actively refusing or trying not to kiss, so I pushed him up the stairs. He took his clothes off (I didn't see any point in telling him I'd do it for him since I wasn't really looking to slow him down), leaving only his black jockstrap, and he jumped up on the bed and got on his hands and knees. Down boy. I pushed him on his back and we made out (or I made out anyway: I'm not sure exactly what he was doing) and I worked on his nips some. I still wasn't getting much of a response, so after three minutes or so, I said, "So, you wanna sit on it?" and he perked right up.

Fortunately, working on his nips had given me good wood, so I just lay back and handed him a condom and some lube. He put them on me and started to take a seat. He'd said it had been a while, and he was having some trouble taking me. He asked for porn, so I got up and put a DVD on, then I put him on his stomach and worked most of the way in and fucked him for a minute that way. Then he wanted to sit on me again, so I got back on my back, and he straddled me and bounced up and down for a couple more minutes. Then he stood up, stroked himself, and came on my stomach. I handed him a towel, and he was downstairs and out the door in about ninety seconds.

I guess that the guy saw me as a human dildo. I'd say that I feel used, but I really can't be that upset about it. It was safe, and he's probably not a bad guy: he just wanted one thing, and it wasn't what I wanted. And once I realized I wasn't going to get anything out of it, I just went on autopilot and made sure that I didn't do anything to slow down his progress. Note to self: make sure reading material is on the bedside table, within easy reach.

I'm not sure I'd have done anything differently to screen him. He answered all the questions the right way, and that usually leads to a good session. Imperfect world, you know?

On the plus side, he annihilated my craving for a cheeseburger. I'm grateful that it's been so long since I had bad sex, and I'll put this guy out of my mind tomorrow.

In the insult-added-to-injury category, Overstock shipped my DVD order in more than one package, and the one that arrived yesterday contained only Drift. Somehow, I remembered Drift as an interesting and sexy movie. Talk about your flawed cultural memory. Who wrote that dialog? Well, actually, it was the director, Quentin Lee. Don't get me wrong: the movie's not a disaster on the order of, say, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. There are some cute boys in it, the acting's not bad, and I got a few wood-inducing moments. But it would be generous to call a lot of the dialog sophomoric. All of that pontificating about the nature of life, love, and Los Angeles is not something that anyone over the age of thirty should want to see. Film school project.

But hey, just remember that sunshine always follows the rain. While I was doing last night's hookup #2 and watching self-important cinema, the Washington Redskins and the Philadelphia Eagles were scoring a suitable number of points to make me this week's winner in the office NFL pool. I love the fact that I can win money in the office pool without ever having to actually watch a game. It was a timely win, too: I used my last three condoms last night, so I'll be dividing the spoil with the drug store.