Bears, bears, bears

[muckefuck]

Poor Scruffy! Most of the people in my circle--particularly those with a Jewish or RC background--are so comfortable talking about religion and their religious upbringing (if any) in such a detached even analytic way that I easily forget how the topic makes him uncomfortable. At cocktail night, he eventually fled to the front room to get away from all the talk of congregation hopping (wacky low church Prods!) and transubstantiation. (A couple of the guys were trying Lebkuchen for the first time and confused by the Oblaten so I compared it to a communion host.)

At least he's still around. He got exasperated with me online several weeks ago and invitations to brunch stopped arriving, so I thought perhaps he'd dropped me. But we met up him at Sather's two weeks ago and Nookies the weekend after that and joked about his tendency to ascribe to malice those behaviours of mine which can adequately be explained by stupidity. (I asked him if he'd invited "Terry" from Big Tim's birthday party and he had no idea who I was talking about because that's not actually the guy's name, so he thought I was somehow taking the piss.) I guess we're back on track again.

Somewhat ironically, here's something I wrote exactly a year ago when we had him and Graysong over for dinner:

It seems whenever I proclaim anyone in my social orbit a great new find, it's their cue to flip out on me and disappear, but they've been around long enough at this point that I think the curse may be off.

Graysong, as you may recall, is still friends but lives in Chattanooga now. And if his increased presence on Facebook is any indication, he's lonely there.

But my clever plan of using him to bring Big Tim & Co. into our orbit seems to be working. He arrived on Saturday with "Terry" (now his roommate) and another companion in tow; Hipster Doofus (the one who asked me for my penis size last time we met) came by later. The Embarrassing Acquaintance was also there and, true to form, showed up a half-hour early. I was very put out at first, but once I got over myself and started chatting, it was pleasant enough. Still, it was hard not to feel rescued when Scruffy came in at the top of the hour bearing almond roca.

Afterward at Touché, it was an odd mix of familiar faces. First I ran into Dale, who defriended me on Facebook months ago after a little spat and hasn't been in touch since. I took that with equanimity, since it's clearly his lifetime m.o., but I wasn't sure what to expect afterwards. Figuring that ignoring him would annoy him more than approaching him, I sidled up and found him more than happy to start filling me in on recent developments in his life. Shortly after, I ran into an A-lister from the old GLBs group and faced a similar dilemma but found him especially warm.

And that set the tone. clintswan walked in and insisted on buying me an "Xmas shot" since he didn't know if we'd see one another again before the end of the year. Later, I ran into Mr A-list again and we had a really sweet conversation about our past relationships and the songs we associated with them. (He also used the phrase "the guy who thinks he's dating me" which stood out to me as a brilliant artifact of Gay English.) But the real surprise was to find myself remembered by another face from the same era, a guy I'd hardly even talked to. And this just moments after being blown off by someone I'd bought a birthday cocktail.

At one point, I leaned over to non-sequitur clintswan with the observation "Men are weird". Last week, I was tidying downstairs and found a note from le Ragoton. I was pleased to discover it caused me no pain whatsoever; I just bemusedly shook my head (both at his extreme dysfunction and my willingness to participate in it), set it down, and moved on to the next thing. Men are weird, but not so bad if you learn how to have no actual expectations of them and simply treat every good gesture as sui generis and something to be enjoyed in the moment.

Comments

[linuxcub.livejournal.com]

Are you guys (you and your friends mentioned at the beginning of your post, I mean) actually religious ?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

What's your motive in asking?

[linuxcub.livejournal.com]

Just wondering ... I thought you were comfortable talking about religion

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I'm not religious. I can't speak for any of the other guys.