My body is still not fully recovered from that drinking binge of Friday night. I still am way more tired than normal, and all that smoking and drinking wreaked hell upon my just recovering immune system. Last week, I had the slightest itching of a sort throat all week long but managed to snuff it out with lots of orange juice, tea, and barely any dairy. Now, it is back with force. I have been taking Advil all day just to be able to swallow things painlessly.

Aside from my body crapping out on me, there is not really much, not really anything I could complain about. I have been listening to good music, cooking decent food, watching decent movies, and spent practically all weekend reading The New Yorker.

Today, the weekend was capped in a very nice fashion, capped by the arrival of Ben and Gabriel this afternoon in their Penske truck. I helped them unload their truck and then met up with them again at Metropolitan, where I saw lots of Sarasota faces I had not seen in a while.

Two other faces, those of boys, faces beyond the circle surrounding me. At the table behind us was this boy whose name I still don't know, and so whom I will again refer to as French Boy due to his rumored French accent. This boy is so beautiful. He has got these thick lips and this pale skin and big olive eyes and just looking at him, strikes something in me. I shudder at the recognition of (or what I perceive to be) beauty in some classical sense. And looking at this face, this gorgeous face that I want to touch, I thought briefly about this theme of beauty and what exactly that means, these, all the half-formed thoughts of a lazy Sunday, wondering if this was some God experience, that that is what the recognition of beauty is (or might be), the recognition of some creation of this planet's that approaches the divine, that to recognize this, the beauty of something (not the hotness, mind you) is either some puerile Wildeish aestheticism, or as I hope, something more, much, much more, that instances of beauty don't emanate from nothing, that there is a source of this that this sprung from.

And along these thoughts, along my line of vision was Christian (not ArtStar douchebag, the other one, the beautiful one). He was sitting behind French Boy, and often my eyes wandered a bit, and were caught quite a few times by Christian, who must think I am totally obsessed with him even though most of the times I was caught starting, I was, in fact, looking at French Boy. But along these thoughts of beauty, I kept on starting at Christian, and his brown eyes, kept trying to look at them closely without making eye contact, a very hard thing to do. They are these really gorgeous brown eyes that I wanted to be able to look at unashamed, unguarded.

And there were these, and there were my good friends near me. I left this bar happy. I came home and it started to rain, again. And more Advil was taken and Gillian Welch was played, as if, now in hindsight, that is not terribly obvious to all of you.