On Bastille Day… getting back on topic

Today, I am more calm about Sarkozy. He’s still right-wing, and I just found out he was born in the 17th Arr.! ARGH! I bet he was born in the north part. (I can’t believe I linked to this website.)

Now, back to the continuation of my mis-scheduled Bastille post:

What had I to say about bromance… I forget. I like my guy friends, they like me, most of us like girls.

Sometime around the start of puberty

(This image replaces a much better image that I believe was being misread.)

my childhood guy friends and I split ways. We ended up at a different school due to ours beginning a massive remodel, so we used some auxiliary/unused/uh… I don’t know what the deal was school, and our classes were changed around to some degree. The grammar school we went to began testing in kindergarten and separated us into similar learning types, and from there divided the students into various specializations. For example, I was initially separated from everyone and sent to a Spanish-only school. My family went along with the “experiment” for a while, but they soon had me rejoin my original classmates. From there, everyone in each group had a differentiated level of course study. There were a few of us who went to school longer than the others, and studied different subjects at different class levels. By third grade, I was tutoring a Greek student (who was 13) in his english.

The overall idea was that we’d study with the same group of kids until high school. During the remodel, though, the concept broke down and… we faded away, socially. I remember once walking through a side courtyard, me to the computer lab and a friend to lunch, us crossing paths and not even looking at each other. He had been one of my best friends but after a few months, our bond was gone. I still had a few classes with some classmates, but even then we didn’t speak much.

Once, another one of my until-then life-long friends walked up to me and said, “Hey, my sister found this the other day.”

(not the note)

It was a valentine I’d made for his older sister years before. I’d totally forgotten I’d had a crush on her, and even that he had a sister. A classmate standing near asked what it was, we showed her, and she said: “I didn’t know you two were friends.” And our simultaneous response: “We aren’t.” Then we backpedaled and tried to explain, but since I don’t even really understand it now, I only remember we didn’t have too many words to try and explain it.

After that, I moved far far far away and that sent a huge shutter down on a lot of my past.

And, yes, I was kind of like that. A shutter down. And, uh, yeah…

The five years from 14 to 19 were not much to write about, or they were. I was outwardly an only slightly strange teen. I hung out with the popular kids at school, though I was still an outsider. I went to school in a secluded community where everyone was very homogeneous. I don’t want to paint them as bad or weird or anything, but every time I try to generalize them, I erase the description and start all over again. Anyway, I was there, I went to school, I did my own thing, I hung out, I pursued my own interests. Thankfully, the school was in some ways similar to my grammar school, so I had more control over what I wanted to study and the whole facility was liberal and relaxed. I can’t say I made any lasting friendships and only briefly considered going to my 10-year reunion this year. On our class’ website, there are pictures and profiles of most everyone I graduated with… and my god, some never left the hamlet lifestyle, let alone the hamlet. Many of them are very successful, some them are just regular people, almost all of them have a plain different life than I.

Many of them are married, kids, house, boat…

It wasn’t until I wandered around for a while afterward and went to college that I started making good friends. By then, Dandyism had crashed again, I mean the whole metro/bi thing, so everything sort of got confusing. Like getting hit on the other night.

(Hopefully Electric Six is still playing.)

I usually go to the gym after work, and I happen to work out a private gym. I’m pretty sure there are more gays than straights there. Whatever, no problem undressing and showering around g(u/a)ys. The sauna, though almost always empty, can get a bit… Let’s just say there’s this one German guy who always uses a bottom locker, doesn’t use a towel around the middle when he’s walking about, and likes to do a lot of squatting… I do not use the sauna if he’s in there. Most times, though, it’s the standard change/workout/shower/leave/don’t talk to anyone. Sometimes, or more than often times, I’ll go to a nearby bar and grab a couple drinks and watch SportsCenter or catch the end or replay of the game. The bar is great, almost entirely wood all the way around, dark, music I haven’t heard since jeepin’ in the backwater of the South. They don’t have any draft beer, they have some tvs, they serve food all night. The crowd varies from

to

so it’s a pretty good mix. I watch some sports, I drink some, I usually keep to myself.

But… occasionally there seems like a bit of a pink mafia hanging out on one side. Fine. So the other night, I’m hanging out, drinking a Miller Lite (the standard of beer they have) and some guy slides into the stool next to me. I look over, nod, look back to the tv.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

I look back, recognize an italian accent and we start chatting, mainly just because europeans are easier and friendlier. He’s from Genova, been here nine months, chat, whatever. I then asks if I work out. I… pause… He’s a little guy, maybe 5′6, giant forearms and biceps, but not all that defined, just big. He then tells me he’s a trainer. I go “oh” and think he’s just trying to drum up some business. About half the people at my gym have trainers and I overhear them bitching about how people aren’t hiring trainers anymore. Cool. Then he feels my biceps… except not like he’s testing the density and mass of a muscle, instead, it was a bit more like coping a feel. I remind myself he’s european. My group of friends in Rome, we kiss on the cheek more than is required, we play slap, we hug. Ok… then, Mr Guido here says: “You have soft skin.”

Ah.

Gotcha.

Why yes I do Mr Guy, you can now stop feeling it.

He then tells me he was finally able to come out now that he’s in the US.

Oh.

Great.

Flattered as I was, I was divided by two instincts: Continue to be amicable, yet let him know I didn’t want him to molest me, or, get up and leave after telling him I wasn’t interested. I’d just got another beer and I didn’t want to seem a homophobe, so I told him I wasn’t gay. We went back to workouts and routines and everything, fine, until he said he’d like to work out his upper legs more… and then grabbed my thigh.

Whoa stallion.

We had a friendly enough good-bye and I was off.

There was another night where I met a girl at a gallery, we went out to a bar where a lot of my friends and a lot of their friends go, I was living in the Netherlands at the time and really any bar or restaurant a 20-something would go to in this neighborhood would be filled with people you know. So we were having drinks and talking to other friends and this guy I sort of knew started talking to the girl. All three of us started drinking and talking and she was really into me, he was really into her and I was just chilling out. I thought she was cool, but reminded me of a lame girl I used to date in college,

hot, but nothing there. I was fine with my buddy working some magic on her, but it hadn’t even got to that point. A number of flestjes into the night, and a bit of the ol’ increasing of flirtation, we decided to go to an after-hours and dance. Now, the Dutch aren’t all that liberal. Sure, you say but:

!

True, true, but only if you’re a tourist and visiting in Amsterdam. The Dutch are actually pretty down on all that, not down for all that. So we’re drinking and dancing, all three of us and my buddy is an extreme close-talker, like put his cheek on yours and let his lips brush your ear. Ok, cool, but looking back on it, I can imagine what others thought about it… oh, wait, I don’t. So there we are, dancing, touching, kissing a bit with the girl, appearing to neck with my buddy, him kissing her… and then he goes to get a beer and she and I are just dancing all sexylike and he comes back and I see him dancing with some creepy dude. Cool, maybe he’s bi and I’ve been misreading everything.

A fat older woman gets my attention and with a worried look points to my friend, then points back to the girl and I. She’s saying something about how our boyfriend is fooling around on us. I look over at him, look back at her, shrug and say it’s ok. Then, suddenly, I get sick to my stomach. The beers have added up until absolute vomiting would be the natural course of events.

Thankfully buddy comes back and starts making out with the girl and I lean back against a ledge and try to recover, consider the difficulty of making it to the wc and making it back and decide it’s better to do that than spew chunk all over where I stand. Unfortunately, maneuvering the washroom is tough. There’s only one and to get to the women’s, one must go through the men’s. This confuses the shit out of me and even though I concentrate hard over one of the women’s pots, nothing comes out. I need to go home, but we stay for another hour or so and I down water.

As the sky is turning a bit light around the edges, we stumble out and huddle together for warmth… and suddenly it’s one of the more awkward moments of my life.

They actually live near each other, I live close to where we are and don’t have a bike there… we kind of talk about me pedaling her bike and her riding on the back… eventually, I say good night, get her number and realize I don’t actually have his. He’s a friend of a friend and this is the most time we’ve ever actually hung out. To get the number, or not?

I didn’t.

They rode off together and I watched. They seemed to be having fun.

I saw him the next night at a party in closed restaurant and opted out of the main space by leaning around with the coats in a hallway between the kitchen and open floor. We didn’t say much to each other. His girlfriend was somewhere. We mostly talked to other people who passed by, including a girl he’d gone to grammar school with, whom he hadn’t seen in 10 years. She was porcine, but not fat and her attitude wasn’t all that positive. She seemed happy to see him at first, then started to sound resentful and eventually dropped some negative comments. She’d moved out of the hometown years ago and worked as a server at the restaurant, and was working that night. It got to a point where we were standing there in silence for too long and she finally had to deliver some drinks. He told me she’d liked him back home and that he was never really friends with her.

Come to think of it, that’s the last time I saw him. He was moving somewhere soon after that. I wonder what happened to him.

On Bastille Day, my thoughts turn to bromance.

First off: Fuck Sarkozy. Who voted for this bozo? Second: Ségolène Royal should have been president. Not only because she’s a pinko, but because she has such a bizarre approach to policy (and not one that I wholly agree with) and because she is beautiful. And in the end, I am not French so I can have whatever opinion I want. In the end, those who would not elect her said she focused too much on societal issues. The end, oh well.

God forbid anyone attempts to lead a country by effecting the people who live in said country.

Four: Here’s what I’m a bit irritated about. Sarkozy, reacting to tensions between China/Tibet in March, says we should boycott the Olympics. So… that starts a bit of action, then, he thinks: Hey, maybe I should ally with China. He says he won’t boycott. He’s going to the opening. He has plans to meet with the Dalai Lama, to which China says: Don’t do it… we’ll get angry.

Celui que je dis n’en tiens pas compte. Alors…

It occurred to me on the way to work that I’ve never been in France during the quatorze julliet.

I have been on the Eurostar a few days after the national holiday, where I happened to sit with a guy who went to the same college (we didn’t know each other) and who went to study abroad and never went back the US. I also sat with a parisienne who’d lived in London for years and who was moving back to Paris, leaving her boyfriend behind, and crying the entire trip. inconsolable crying. It was a strange trip. The guy’s last name was Brilliant. That’s about all I remember of him. We were the last train of the night, but at a point we powered down and stopped in the countryside for over an hour, the train dark. I’m not sure what was going on, the voice from the ceiling only telling us everything was fine and we’d be moving momentarily. As we sat in the darkness, fireworks began going off in the middle of a field. Left-over, of course, from earlier in the week, but it was so strange to see the explosion from a dark train with no homes in sight.

Off the train, in Paris Nord, I went straight to the taxi stand and promptly got into a fight with my cabbie who didn’t want to put my bag in the trunk. I asked, in french, if he spoke english and he said no, so I only spoke in french until he refused to respond. Fine, whatever, but I gave him the address to my hotel, told him it was in the 17th Arr. — I stay in the same hotel every time — and… he pulled out his A-Z.

While driving, he consulted… …and consulted, then threw the map in my face and said “You find.” Not in french, either. I found the street in a second, and he yelled at me that I’d found the wrong street, so I pushed myself through the partition and shoved the map under his nose and said, “Non, il est ici. Regarde, mec!”

“Ok, ok.”

Then, he made a big show of taking my bag out of the trunk in the middle of a traffic jam, when we were sort of close to the hotel… saying, “You find.” Honestly, I was happy to finally be done with vehicles and happily tipped him. Dumb American.

And, as for liberté, egalité, fraternité, or maybe… confraternité d’attirance(?).

Bro-dy

My friends and I… are a bunch of bromance m.f.ers. You see us at a bar, we’re leaning against each other and close talking, we hug a lot and it’s definitely a tender and wondrous connection. We braid each other’s hair and help with the manscaping, exfoliation, drink microbrewskis and get together for every Yankee’s game in front of the television and drink manhattans.

Okay, not really, but we’ve gone through long conversations recently about how short our curlies are, and how we get them that short. A mate (British) is convinced all Americans shave their balls. Another mate trims his with scissors and takes pains to make sure there’s a bit of a… ravine… between the brush and the tree. Others have all sorts of methods/designs/reasons. One guy says his nipples could blink if he didn’t keep his chest trimmed. Another buddy trims his chest/stomach down real close and trims the pubes, but says he wasn’t really planning on the back hair and doesn’t know what to do about it. To his credit, it’s light, sparse and not that noticeable. I keep my chest and stomach trimmed and that’s about it. And this weird small patch of hair on my right shoulder… where’d that come from? Why’s it there? This pisses me off.

As for the face, we’ve spent hours trading methods like some kids trade baseball cards… in the 1950s. One friend, no matter what, cannot keep razor burn off his jaw and throat. I’ve event shown him how to shave, which direction his hair grows in, and he says it doesn’t matter. Thank god his balls don’t get ingrown hairs. That would be a bitch. Some buddies go from Grizzly Adams

Total bromance.

to

with no in between. I vary between heavy stubble to clean shaven, and every variation between. I started shaving when I was about 11, which is about the age half my friends started and about five years before my other friends started. I had a goatee for a while in high school, but then again, about 80% of the guys did. I, of course, grew a beard in college and had it for about six months. It was fine after I got used to it, but my facial hair is definitely coarse, so it wasn’t the best for romance of the non-bro kind. After I trimmed/shaved that up, I had a goatee for a long time. When I lived in England, I didn’t shave for a while, then shaved… and without clippers… one hard son of a bitch. Once, after a while on the Mediterranean, I had a good beard going and some dark skin. The only time I’ve been searched at an airport. Since 22, though, I really haven’t gotten too crazy with the face fuzz. I look older with too much ten-day shadow, so I try to trim once a week, and I usually shave down on Saturday. Occasionally, I’ll rock a variety of face creations on the weekend, though, many times they don’t get past the couch.

I have to meet a friend for drinks (basic crew cut, no more than a two-day stubble, no body trimming), but I have so much to actually say about bromance.

And I have to talk about the guy who hit on me last night.

Also… you may say: la quatorze julliet is not today, for today is 9 July. Yes… see I thought today was the 14th.