We had come back to my house, taken a cab from the East Village. I had promised to roast him some garlic. We got stoned instead and sat in my bed. Diego was going on and on about how he feels weird about how he is beginning to love Lady Gaga, and it's a thing I have heard a few friends say lately, that they are beginning to like this person a lot. Specifically, he was talking about the song "Dancer in the Dark" and how he had listened to it over and over again at the gym. He explained his reading of the song. I told him to play it for me. He played it for me on his phone's speakers. We continued to smoke weed while listening to the song, we were already drunk, having come back from some bar, and the intersection of the substances with the lateness of the evening with the setting of two boys in bed together talking about music made it all quite lovely, made me love this song also, though I wasn't sure I entirely got what the song was trying to say. I asked him if the song held any reference points to Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark." He didn't know.
My phone's speakers now put to use, the Boss playing this song. The song is sentimental, is beautiful, is full of expectation and excitement toward a night ahead, toward what nights mean in a life that is otherwise sad, toward the act of living. I started to kiss Diego in a way that was filled with all of these sentiments, this song and this boy near me making me quite giddy. We continued to kiss and to fool around, touching each other's bodies, as the song switched to another Bruce song and another, me failing to reach for my phone, buried somewhere now in my bed, to turn it off, and I'm not sure I have ever used Bruce as a soundtrack to making out, but it really works quite well, colored the actions I was participating in a mournful and exuberant light.
The temperature has dropped, below freezing last night and this morning, the weather invigorating but more so daunting, me not wanting to venture too far past my doorstep, past the heated comfort of my apartment. Last night, I went to Eastern Bloc, flirted with some boys, wanted to flirt with others and instead just made eyes at them, hoping that that would somehow lead to conversation, to making out, to sex, to holding hands. It didn't. The bar was quite crowded but filled with lots of button-down shirts (which, don't get me wrong, I love if they are fitted and interesting and somehow conveying a sense of dress-up), lots of people that I was not so sure about. The Pixie Harlots were dancing there and I kept chatting with some of them, dancing with some of them, and I realized I could be at a bar where it wasn't just the performers who were interesting, but rather the attendees of the bar and that I should head over to Mattachine. With this intention, I left the bar. Not even half a block away, I was ready to throw in the towel and headed to a pizza place to think about what I really wanted to do while I ate a slice. What I really wanted to do was to be warm and so I headed into a cab again - the subway seeming too far in the cold, Mattachine seeming even further, and yet me still occasionally wondering how I burn through money so quickly - and headed back home. I texted this 19 year old I have been sleeping with off of some silly iPhone app to come over. I started watching people from "The Jersey Shore" talking about themselves on mtv.com because my interest in trashy television that that station is capable of manufacturing has apparently not waned even as I near the age of 30. I was stoned and too drunk and told him I would probably pass out soon, that he should maybe not come over. He said he would be over in 20 minutes. I stayed up and waited a bit, that time limit. This morning I see from texts that he had come back to our neighborhood but that I was asleep by then.
The year is 2009. In a few short weeks (just think of how short these past nine years have been), we will be in another decade. There are technologies that enable me to meet gay men based on their proximity in feet to where I am. I can chat with them and depending on our horniness and our levels of attraction to a random picture we have decided to choose to represent ourselves with on the site, can meet up. Sometimes our horniness will be at such a level that our thresholds for what we consider attractive fall quite a bit. I can talk about music with a boy in my bed and we can mention a specific song and he can hum it for me or just as easily he can pull the thing up on his phone and play it over its speakers. There is coffee that is still brewed in ways my grandmom would be familiar with and the feelings that boys give me seem somehow not dependent upon this particular year, this moment in time. It is quite cold outside and I dress myself in layers, in a scarf, in a hat, and in a jacket, just as my mother taught me to when leaving for school in the morning as a child.
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