The Death of Imagination

So we got off to an odd and unpromising start when I woke up shivering non New Year's Day despite having just slept in a brand-new set of the thickest and warmest flannel sheets I've ever owned. That led to temperature check which led to a COVID test which led to staying home and isolating for two weeks. Then literally my first day back at work, I caught a head cold that knocked me down for several more days. Things went better after that, though I am just getting over a sore throat that threatened to wreck Mardi Gras and Valentine's Day for me.

Not that I had any great plans. Tuesday night, I went over to JR's to see Saltburn so I could finally participate in the discourse. I'd been fascinated with it since the first trailers but I didn't expect it to receive such mainstream attention so I was in no hurry to see it. I did a decent job of avoiding spoilers but they still managed to suck a bit of the enjoyment out of it. Like many, I was also disappointed by the ending, which seemed to undermine the story and the development of the main character, making both less ambiguous and interesting.

This was my second time this year hanging with JR in a low-key sort of way. The first time came after the memorial for ChefBearItalia. I stayed until the end, hoping maybe my friends would invite me back to hang out with them for a bit, but they didn't and I started heading back. Realising that Clint was not likely to be very interactive that evening and not wanting to stew alone, I reached out to JR and invited myself over. We rewatched Barbie, ate a little dinner, I called my mom for her birthday and then went home.

It was exactly the kind of intimate unstructured time I've wanted with him since we first met. The only thing lacking is some physical intimacy. I'm hoping that eventually he'll relax to the point where he'll accept some friendly cuddling. He has gotten better about that in other contexts (such as a friends' Lunar New Year Party last weekend), but I think one-on-one is harder for him. I particularly worry about him becoming touch-starved once his dog passes away, since his dating life is as quiet as it's ever been.

As for my dating life? It's still very unsettled. Once again, none of the possibilities enumerated in previous posts (plus a couple more which had cropped up since then) have panned out. Overall I'm getting pretty tired of folks telling me, yes, absolutely, they do want to get together and then somehow never making any plans, even though I've been guilty of that myself. The closest I've come to a steady thing is my mustachioed electrician, who seems very chuffed that I've taken to calling him "lover" after we've gotten together two or three times. Unfortunately he's signed up for lots of long hours and overtime in order to make the pots of money he needs for the dream house he wants to build, leaving him with almost no time free to drive the hour each way up here to frolic with me.

So against that background, it was pretty crazy what happened yesterday. First, let me introduce Big Dick Down Low Daddy or BDDLD (not to be confused with Big Dick Rick or any other Big Dicks I might have mentioned here). He showed up out of the blue at Daddy Daycare late last November, having been invited by one of our mutuals. To the extent that I have a type which Monshu was the embodiment of, he was a classic exemplar, a burly bearded white-haired daddy with a big smile and roving hands. He convinced me to blow him in the restroom after refusing to give me his number and I impulsively asked him to ditch the Daddies and come back with me, which he did.

It was a lot of fun, though not as much as it would have been if we hadn't both been fairly loaded. Fortunately, we got a rematch the next day when he came back to retrieve the cap he'd left behind. At the time he told me he was usually "one and done" (presumably to avoid getting too attached to anyone). So I'd filed away the bonus session as a fluke owing to unusual circumstances. He mentioned he'd try to come to a future event and I joked about him making his way through our circle of daddy-chasers like a new illness. I didn't abandon all hope of getting with him again, but I didn't consider it especially likely either.

Then, a couple weeks ago, he came down again. I hadn't been feeling great and was planning on a quiet night in when he texted and asked if I was coming to the meetup. My response was swift: "I guess I am now." This time we didn't even make it to the bathroom and I was probably present all of 30 minutes before we left together. I joked that it would have made much more sense for him to stop by on his way into town instead.

So when yesterday I saw a phone call from him (via Messenger, our only channel of communication), I thought maybe he proposing just that. He was actually calling just to tell me that he wouldn't be coming down because he had too much to do before leaving for Florida in a week or so for an extended stay that would keep him away until at least April. So why tell me? Because he saw me comment in the group chat, realised all this, and hoped to rendezvous again in two months. "But I started thinking, I'm kind of a one-sided guy, maybe he doesn't want to see me again."

It was kind of touching, after having so many folks tell me they like me and want to be with me and then not follow through to have someone reverse the script and tell me not to expect anything only to then ask, "We are going to see each other again, aren't we?" Will we? Only time will tell. But it gave me a certain warm fuzzy feeling which set the tone for the evening.

So I didn't really care later when, at the gathering, I saw Useless Fuckboi and he studiously ignored me despite having texted only a week earlier inviting me to get a drink with him (and again afterwards to explain that he "needed time with my friend", i.e. date). And I flirted with the cute boy in the ice cream parlour without any real expectation of it leading anywhere (even though we did spend a chunk of today sexting each other and planning a future session). And I took it in stride when a little cutie showed up at my elbow at SoFo and practically begged me to chat him up. A friend asked me today if all this fleeting attention was making me "jaded". I'm not sure that's the word I'd use. I'm trying to enjoy it without expecting anything to come of it--something I was terrible at in my youth and seem to finally have something of a knack for now. Yay, wisdom of age!

So to explain the crisis I found myself in last Saturday, I think I need to go back a bit.

On Halloween, I met a boy.

It happened like this: My straight neighbours had a Halloween party on Halloween eve. After a couple hours of that, I decided to see what the scene was like at Touché. I figured some of my friends would be there, which they were, so I flitted about and generally had a good time.

Sometime after 1 a.m. on Halloween itself, I found myself in the backroom chatting with a guy I'd met at a party once and had kept up with over lockdown. He was there with a friend (who we'll anachronistically call "BB") who'd recently moved here from DC. BB and I started flirting, then we started snogging, and finally I invited him back to my place for a fun time. We had so much fun, in fact, that he didn't leave until 5 a.m.

So far, so typical for a one-night stand from Touché. I made sure we exchanged numbers, though, and then waited a couple days to text. Before I did, he got in touch, we chatted a bit, and I playfully asked him for "a song to fall asleep to". He sent me "Mohabbat" from Arooj Aftab, who I'd never heard of, and it was so beautiful it reduced me to tears.

We wanted to get together the following weekend, but I was heading down to STL for a family gathering. Long story short, I wasn't leaving until early Saturday morning and his friend dragged him to the Anvil on Friday night, where I met up with them. We moved on to Touché and I took BB home again--this time making sure he left at 2 a.m. so I wasn't an exhausted wreck the next day.

At this point, what I really had was a successful two-night stand, but my heart went berserk. It's convinced itself that this is nothing less than the start of a beautiful relationship. Since then, I've been kind of running on two tracks: My mind tells me to be cautious, to take this slowly, to consider the risks. Meanwhile, my heart has decided this is the Man Who Will Make Me Happy and doesn't want to hear anything else.

It got so bad, I finally decided I needed to do something drastic. Near the end of last month, his parents came into town for an extended stay. I used this as an excuse to stop texting him cold turkey. The first couple days were hard, but it got progressively easier. By the end of two weeks (the arbitrary time limit I'd set), I was actually questioning whether to reach out and reopen Pandora's box or just return to the status quo ante.

You see, the more we chatted, the more my mind realised he's not a good candidate for anything long-term. He asked me if the fact that he'd never had a boyfriend was a "red flag"; my reaction was, no, but it is a yellow one. Being someone's first boyfriend is a tough job and I'm not sure it's one I want to take on. Plus he's got a very demanding job that only leaves him available on weekends. And even though he was the first to reach out to me, I've been the one to initiate every exchange since then.

But I did reach out, he enthusiastically accepted my invitation to a friend's game day last Saturday, and I found being secure in the knowledge I would see him made me less anxious and needy. I thought, "Cool, the break worked, I've got a handle on this."

And then I saw him again.

People just want to be remembered. Of course, if you asked us what we wanted, I'm sure we'd all say "love" and "respect". But we recognise that those are in short supply sometimes--particularly when you're looking for them. So when it comes to what we're willing to settle for, it can be as simple as just someone knowing your name.

This was the theme of my weekend. My cocktails were an unexpected success. I beat a couple bushes, but mostly people came to me. One of these was Martian Boy, who's moved back home to Indiana after the better part of a decade on the East Coast. Diego, his ex, was also expected at the gathering. I didn't think there'd be a problem there, and I was right. They've both recently come out of LTRs. I don't think that mattered much for Diego, who's always been able to maintain good relations with exes, but it may have helped MB's perspective that his dream husband turned out to be a complete dickhead.

This all came out in, of all places, the back bar at Touché's when I ran into a long-lost coworker who I first met through Diego. (I asked for his phone number, and when I supplied his surname without prompting his response was, "I can't believe you remember that!") He'd been singing his praises for a few minutes before I pointed out, "By the way, this is his ex." When the man himself finally arrived, the mutual friend was like, "We've been saying such nice things about you I feel like we should be tearing you down now."

Earlier, in the kitchen, I told the stories of my first meeting with each of them. Diego lived across the hall from monshu, but we didn't actually speak until I ran into him at a restaurant dining with a mutual acquaintance (who neither of us keeps up any longer). Some time later, I knocked on his door to find him for some reason and Martian Boy answered it wearing nothing but longjohn bottoms. (I remember a brief moment of mutually checking-out; he professes not to.)

I probably couldn't tell you ten things about MB despite nominally knowing him for years. But recalling that incident was enough for him to praise my memory effusively at the bar later. The trigger was running into another old acquaintance, this one a rare visitor to Touché. In fact, he claimed that the last time he'd been there was the last time he'd seen me, and that was roughly a year ago. We'd hung out in the hallway chatting for a while. He'd told me all about his amazing scrotum, which could be wound around several times.

So naturally the first thing I said when I saw him was, "HELICOPTER BALLS!" He feigned embarrassment, but under it he was gratified. Then I told MB the story about how I'd first met him: in the same bar, wearing a "FREE HUGS" t-shirt. I'd taken him up on his offer, then experienced a moment of awkwardness as it became clear that I wasn't quite his target audience. As he left, he said, "See you again a year from now." Before he went, I asked him for his given name and I'm determined to remember it for the next time.

All of these little occurrences returned to my mind on Sunday evening as I watched Ayoade's adaptation of The Double with Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg's character is too meek to claim the love and respect he deeply craves. All he really wants is recognition on the most basic level: for someone to know his name and his face and recall them spontaneously. And when even that is denied him, he has a complete breakdown.

I worry about some of these men, that they're never far from that themselves. Whenever I haven't seen one of them for a while, dark thoughts cross my mind. But Saturday wasn't like that. The bar was filled with familiar faces; we went over en masse and held together surprisingly well over the course of the evening. It was a little victory against the forces of entropy and forgetfulness.

Friday night I took shelter in numbers and discharged an outstanding obligation to colleague. Ever since a Senegalese coworker reopened his restaurant, I've been promising to come visit. I like him, I like Senegalese food, but I really really dislike being kept up all night with killer reflux from eating spicy food late, so I've been waiting for a weekend where I didn't have much going on. This turned out to be that weekend, and as a bonus I was able to tag along with a gang of work buddies. All in all, this visit was very reminiscent of the last except that the food was better and the service, incredibly, much worse. To his credit, our friend tried to get us to order dishes ahead of time so he could get a jump on preparing them, but we misunderstood how to do this and didn't. His sole waitress (and girlfriend?) largely ignored our table; I was going to order some tea, but I was lucky to get water, and that after nearly an hour of being seated. Pretty much everyone else was drinking the bear, wine, and whiskey they'd brought, which made them good diverting company, but also less focused than me on actually getting an order together.

Happily, they were all open to eating family-style. I was looking forward to sampling a wide array of dishes, but in the end we had only five. The appetiser course (arriving at the one-and-a-half-hour mark) was a sampling of pastels, deep-fried pastries with fillings of chicken, fish, and vegetables. About a half-hour later, we had a rather bland vegetable medley "in honour of the [sole] vegetarian". Then another long pause before the yassa au poulet, chicken braised in a spicy mustard-garlic sauce with plenty of grilled onions (we'd been given steamed rice to eat with it, but I was the only one with any left by the time the dish arrived, and then only because I'd literally been nibbling it one grain at a time) and a bland salad notable only for the presence of a squash-like vegetable no one could identify. At this point, it was nearly nine o'clock, and I told myself I wasn't going to have a bite more, despite feeling far from sated. But I gave in at the sight of the mountain of chicken curry that arrived some time later, and was only a little sorry to find it lacking the terrific juiciness of the yassa.

I can't fault my friend's culinary skills, but there are obvious limitations to being the sole chef and cooking everything to order. Besides the nine of us, they served only eight other diners during the four hours we were there. Even with a small salary pool, how can you turn a profit with only four covers an hour on what should be your busiest night? I should've been charmed by the way he would come out and sit with us each time to discuss what the next course would be, but all I really wanted was for him to get back into the kitchen and cook us some damn food, any kind of food. So I'm glad I made it over during what I suspect will be the relatively brief window that the restaurant will be open. And I know he must've been pleased, too, because he remembers my previous visit so well that he knows exactly what I ate (maafe) and mentioned this several times.

Naturally, not everyone was ready to go home when the dinner party broke up around ten, so at the instigation of a Tennessean grad student cum security guard I'll call "Rocky Top", we ended up at the Oasis, Rogers Park's most celebrated surviving dive bar. My total exposure to it heretofore consisted of using the wreck of a restroom, which is shared with the little Korean-run sushi bar next door. I can certainly see the attraction to Rocky Top, a would-be novelist, but it's a bit much to take sober. An hour or so of trying to avoid eye contact with the William H. Macy hangdog face of the middle-aged man across from us was enough for me, so I promised them cocktails chez nous to make up for failing to buy a round and slunk home.

Today felt like a second Saturday. Our first Saturday was eight hours in the Loop shopping followed by a break for dinner and then, for me, four hours at SoFo with clintswan. So today had to be correspondingly less ambitious, and it was: two hours shopping in Andersonville (including an hour for brunch at Vincent) followed by naps, some light pruning (for me), a second Thanksgiving dinner, and a movie on the couch together.

The movie was 2011's Bernie (thanks, joebehrsandiego, for the tip), which if I knew had been directed by Richard Linklater I'd forgotten. I have to credit his tremendous commitment to naturalism with coaxing probably the best performance I've ever seen from Jack Black and for sure from McConaughey. But his real coup was the interviews with smalltown East Texas natives interspersed throughout the film. I was genuinely unsure whether they were actually actors or not until I went and looked it up afterwards.

Needless to say, I lapped up the accents like melted ice cream. [Word of caution to Yankees and Europeans who think people who speak like McConaughey are difficult to understand: You will need subtitles.] The film is being touted as a "black comedy", though to some degree simply because it doesn't fit any other obvious marketing category. There's real pathos as well as the occasional laugh-out-loud moment, and what ties it together is an attempt to explore the complexity of human nature.

Speaking of which, I had a personal growth moment at the bar last night. It was crowded up front, and clintswan and I headed to the back so he could use the ATM. On the way there, I scanned the crowd for familiar faces and found one: Le Ragoton. I was already past him before the penny dropped, so all I gleaned from his expression was that he'd recognised me. Later, as we took up a spot against the back wall (close enough to the bathroom that we were guaranteed "Are you in a line?" as a potential conversation-starter for as long as we wanted it) I knew that if I looked over to where I'd seen him he'd be gone and he was.

When I told monshu the story the next day, he said, "So, you made him leave the bar. Good." At the time, though, I didn't even feel a Pyrrhic sense of victory, only pity. He'd had to stop coming to Touché because he couldn't bear the possibility of running into me. Now he may feel he has to avoid SoFo as well. What kind of way is that to live when you're a month shy of your 62nd birthday? My response, by contrast, was equanimity: It was bound to happen sometime in this tiny gay village. It didn't really change my attitude toward the evening; I told my companion because I thought he'd find it interesting and fifteen minutes later I'd forgotten all about it.

Three hours later, I was at the front bar again with some guys from the gaming group thinking to myself, I should really go, but still enjoying the company and the atmosphere too much to make a move. The music was a surprisingly decent blend of current pop and 90s throwbacks, with a couple mashups and novelty videos (including a hilarious illustration of what happens when Carly Rae meets Chatroulette); some of the big bears across from us were doing some serious chairdancing. I'll see some of the guys again at brunch tomorrow. (Though not the chairdancers--they were a part of the crowd of out-of-towners I was hoping to catch by going out on a holiday weekend.)

Yesterday evening I made my way to A Taste of Heaven in Andersonville. (Yes, that Taste of Heaven.) I took a seat at the window bathed in sunlight and looked out on the people strolling by as I sipped tea, read my books, and devoured a lovely roasted pear salad with juicy tender chicken and rich dollops of cheese. It would've been perfectly delightful if not for one thing[*]: I was only killing time waiting for the summons to join Bumiputeri at Hamburger Mary's.

Initially I was puzzled why she invited me out for drinks with her work friends. What do I have to talk about with a bunch of social workers anyway? Puzzled, that is, until she told me how much she wanted me to meet her co-worker Rick. Even before she spoke the dreaded words "You two have a lot in common," I knew what was up.

She was playing collect and trade.

My first gay mentor warned me about this game way back in high school. "When you're gay, women collect and trade you like baseball cards. 'Oh, you've got a gay friend? I've got a gay friend. Let's get our gay friends together!" But I wasn't out until college, so I was able to dodge being the victim of this game for another four years. I can still hear my college pal Sandra's voice uttering almost exactly the same codephrases. "You have a lot in common." "You'll like him."

Can we all agree right off the bat that "You'll like him" is just an obnoxiously presumptuous thing to say in general, regardless of motives or reasoning? That would raise my hackles even coming from someone who thoroughly understands my taste. Seventeen years I've known Nuphy--one of the most easygoing men I've ever met--and I still can't predict which of my friends he'll hit it off with and which he won't.

The good thing about being un pédé d'un certain age is that you know the drill, you know the other guy does, too, and you can both minimise the awkwardness of the situation. If you choose to, that is.

Thing is, I'm a bad friend. I know that if I agree to certain things, I should have the decency to see them through with good grace. But I combine being too well-intentioned to turn someone down with being too petty to keep my big mouth shut. So there I was in the back bar with Bumiputeri and her friend Jazz, hearing her say once again, "You'll like him." And I was simply too fed up not to ask:

"Why will I like him?"
"Because you two have things in common."
"What do we have in common?"
"Well...he's been to Germany."
"Okay. What else?"
"He likes to drink beer, too."
"Okay, beer and Germany. Is that it?"
"He's Catholic."
"You know that I haven't done anything Catholic for twenty years, don't you?"
"No, I didn't. Maybe he'll make you start going to church again."

So what do you think we talked about when he finally did show up? We actually did discuss Germany. It turns out the reason he's been there is that the programme he administers employs a lot of Germans who are doing their civil service. So that was five minutes of conversation. But mostly we talked about neighbourhoods, street crime, and Off Off Campus.

Yep, he went to UofC, too. The SINGLE STRONGEST INDICATOR of our compatibleness and she never thought to mention it. (Not that I get along with everyone who graduated from there by any means, but it does generally guarantee we'll have at least enough interesting conversation to fill an hour.) Naturally we never brought up being gay at all. Why should we? Would two straight people have talked about being straight?

In the end, it all would've been just fine, a decent way of passing an hour. He was no fool either; like any gay man, he'd been here before and knew how to extract himself tactfully. But Bumiputeri had to hover at my elbow as if making small talk with strangers in bars wasn't something I had a good decade and a half of practice with. She once tried to leave but quickly returned because she felt "bad" about leaving us--which is ironic because it was much easier to chat without her watching while doing nothing to get a conversation going.

So next time a female friend tells me about some guy I've just got to meet because "you'll like him", I won't try to humour her. I'll politely volunteer to take her out to dinner myself instead, then gently explain to her the error of her ways.

Objoebehrsandiego: Has a friend ever tried to bring you together with someone you had little in common with? How did you handle the situation?

Any straights out there want to confess to having played collect and trade before? (Reminder: Anonymous posting is enabled.)


[*] Well, two things, actually; the music was incredibly bad. One Van Halen song, okay, ironic retro kitsch. But two? That should be actionable.

Tonight was my triumphant return to Burger Night at Big Chicks. Yesterday I came to the realisation that this might be my last chance to milk the sympathy of navigating the place on crutches. Since once you lay those down, you're no longer a pitiful disabled man, you're just some twat wearing an ugly shoe.

The charming hottie who takes the orders was suitably solicitous, but most of the crowd were strangers. Coleman was sweet enough to secure a table out front so we could watch the comings and goings, but the only visitors we had were the Scoutmaster, Mr Foot Fetishist (who couldn't keep his hands off my hair), and Diego. Not that I wasn't happy to see them all, but half that bunch will be at Coleman's party in a couple weeks anyway.

I rode back up with the Scoutmaster and he hit the CTA jackpot when the driver offered to drop him a couple blocks from his home on her way back to the garage. My karma wasn't so good: Somewhere along the way I must've dropped my CTA card. At least I never keep more than $10 on it any more and I think in this case it was down to $5. Hopefully it'll make someone's day.

I'm sitting at home today because I'm a dumbass. My first dumbass decision was that binge drinking at German Fest was a good idea, and pretty much everything else follows from there.

The rain Saturday morning dampened the GWO's enthusiasm for the Lakewood-Balmoral massive cooperative yard sale, so I frittered away the morning until it was time for the Great Book Giveaway at Spookyfruit Manor. There I linked up with my car-enabled younger brother and we sped down to Lawrence just in time to see the empty floats departing. Nuphy met us at the gate and we were soon sharing litre plastic steins of beer.

So far, so good. But Nuphy had to take off for the free opera concert in Millennium Park and bunj left not long at meeting the Scoutmaster. (Sorry, Bunji, should've given you some heads-up about the casual racism.) Now, as I've noted before, he's not the best influence on my drinking habits. In fact, the only time I was ever puking drunk was due to going out and doing karaoke with him. That at least did result in the "no-Jäger" rule, but its one puny defence against an arsenal of threats.

I convinced him to take a break from the festivities so I could sit for a bit and check out the revamped Delicatessen Meyer. (Now being run by Gene's Sausage Shop.) But soon enough we were back hefting another pair--though not without a fortifying foundation of sausage and sauerkraut first. A couple standing at the same Stehtisch were interested in my Leberkäse, so I struck up a conversation and found out that they were here for a reunion of students who were in Paderborn at the same time that I was in Freiburg im Breisgau.

Our attempts to lure Coleman to us failed, so we agreed to meet him in Boystown. He suggested Buck's patio, but the Scoutmaster dragged us to Little Jim's, where he could drink a bit more cheaply. As I was downing a manhattan with a Long Guylander, I got text from Tuppers that everything was tote Hose at Mahoney's, the "Irish" pub owned by a Geordie pal. (Apparently the Geordie has relocated to San Diego and the warmth of his charm is greatly missed.) "I'm coming to you," he said--just before my phone died.

So I made my excuses--he can't abide Coleman--and met him on the street. His choice was Tequila's, a sports bar adjoining Roscoes, and I had another manhattan on the fabulous patio. I kept singing along to the retro mix on the sound system, which got us talking about dancing. So I suggested the Wild Pug, where I have successfully gone and cut a rug in the recent past.

When we got there, all the action was behind the bar in the form of two superenergetic young tenders who were getting freaky to the dance pop. Now I had had the sense to stop drinking at this point, but my buzz was not going anywhere. So when Tuppers admired the shirtless young sweetie's propulsive pogoing, it seemed like a great idea to say, "Oh, I can do that!" and treat him to a demonstration.

There are plenty more embarrassing ways to injure yourself in a bar than by dancing, but it still doesn't do much for one's dignity to admit that you can't walk because of a pogoing accident. I mean, I guess an unsuccessful attempt to do the sprinkler would be worse, but not really by much. I covered well at the time. As soon as I came down on the side of my foot, I knew something had gone horribly wrong, but I managed to slink back to the barstool without tipping anyone off.

But there was no hiding anything the next evening when he came over for dinner to find me hopping about on one foot. monshu has been quite supportive, considering he confesses to not having much sympathy given the circumstances under which the injury occurred. If I needed proof of how feeble I've become in my old age, I have it now, as I sit hear waiting for my PCP to call me back with information on obtaining crutches.

1. The servers will ask you whether you want separate checks--or just bring them that way. (It's been so long since this happened to me in the States that at first I couldn't figure out what the hell they were asking for.)
2. You probably won't see anything telling you where the restrooms are, but if you head for the sign saying "SORTIE" ("EXIT"), you'll stumble across them.
3. When you get there, you'll find that there's actually hot water in the hot water tap. Sometimes scaldingly hot!
4. Taking food home is just not comme il faut. An older gentleman told me he's tried to acclimate himself to the fact that Americans and younger people find this perfectly acceptable, but it still strikes him as very déclassé. He's seen proprietors refuse to give customers doggy bags and even excoriate them for asking.
5. The one beer you can find pretty much everywhere isn't PBR. It's not even Labatt's or Molson. It's freakin' Bud. (Yeah, I can't understand it either.)

Additionally, a co-worker tells me that it's easy to find good draught cider in Montréal. I imagine she's right, but you'd never know that from the kinds of places we ended up. I wonder, though, how much of that is just a by-product of spending so much time in the Village and of the shitty selection that seems sadly typical of gay bars everywhere.


*Based on my extremely limited experience and Americentric perspective.

Q: How can you tell that the drinking establishment you are in is not a sports bar?
A: When they turn off a four-all home-team game in the MIDDLE OF THE FRIGGIN' 11TH INNING!

I couldn't believe it! One minute I'm waiting with bated breath for Hancock to strike out a Cubs batter, the next I'm looking at static. Then, a bit after that, some campy 50s scifi trash. WTFF? I whinged, I complained; it got me the sympathy of the owner, but not much else.

I can hear what y'all're saying: That's what you get for trying to watch baseball in a fag bar, and you're probably right. But there are compensations: Even if I could've gotten such well-mixed cosmopolitans in a straight bar, I might not have had the cojones to order them. (It's hard enough already being a Cards fan in this city without opening myself up to more abuse.) And I would've had to listen to some dire classic rock rather than being treated to The Editors, New Order, and Tom Tom Club.

The game's still going on, btw: Top of the 14th and the Cubs how just now pulled ahead by one run. What I wouldn't give to be watching this with someone who gave a shit how it turned it out.