I am her foil.

A friend of mine and I keep up via gchat/gmail. It’s gotten to a point where we chat a bit every other day or so, but never see each other in real life and do not have any other contact with one another. In fact, I say we’ve seen each other three times over the past six years. She maintains that we’ve seen each other twice in the past eight months. (We can’t agree to how long we’ve known each other.) I also joke that I am a wholly imaginary friend of hers.

me: nothing i eat, so i’m no help.

dorthea: have you had chocolate chip pancakes before

?

8:41 PM you are not an idiot, right?

and not at this moment naked?

me: i don’t like pancakes.

i don’t really eat ice cream

dorthea: but the chocolate chips counter the pancakiness

me: i generally don’t eat too much yogurt

i don’t really like melted chocolate

dorthea: really?

8:42 PM i don’t know what to say to that

me: yes

dorthea: i’m not sure i can trust you anymore

chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven?

me: i am imaginary and live in the corner of your screen.

dorthea: that’s right

you do

me: “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.”

dorthea: also true

but if i were to make you up

me: chocolate chip cookies… they’re ok.

8:43 PM not really my thing either

dorthea: you would definitely like chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven

and i would make them for you all the time

me: that would not be much of a foil.

8:44 PM dorthea: are you saying i cannot make things for my imaginary…

me: isn’t an imaginary foil better than an imaginary mirror?

8:45 PM dorthea: interesting question.

i do not need more imaginary mirrors

8:46 PM me: that’s an interesting question

We have mutual friends, and more than the ones we originally met through. For example, a girl I went to grad school with, and who I had a very minor dating relationship with more than three years ago, is now in a very serious relationship with my friend’s best friend from grad school (grad school for them was the Midwest).

It was a bit surprising when I got this email:

do you know kizzy finlay?

did you know that waking up after crying all night feels like waking up with a hangover. waking up with a hangover feels like waking up with a hangover.

My response:

wow, what an email to wake up to.

yes… why?

Hers:

do you like kizzy finlay? is she a good artist? a good person? you can be honest, i won’t tell her. she’s dating my best friend from iowa, stanford baum, translator of ganem, mentioned in the article. just wondering what you thought of her. i didn’t particularly care for his previous serious girlfriend–she had some good qualities, but a little too something for me to click with her–wondering if he was just dating into type or making a change. either way, he seems happy, which is all that matters. stanford and kizzy are in spain together at the moment. then going to africa next month.

Boy howdy, that was a hard email to answer. There are a lot of details to explain it all but…

So this Kizzy was a little crazy, didn’t know what she wanted, we’d go out, it would be all romantic, then we’d walk back to her apartment holding hands and at the door she’d ask if I wanted to crash on the couch…

I asked what that meant, and she just sort of shrugged. I asked where she was sleeping. She said her bed, which happens not to be in the living room. A while ago, I decided to play my side of the game by taking women at their word. I kissed her good night and said I could walk the ten blocks back to my apartment if she was offering me a place on her couch and not her bed. The next night, it was almost a replay of the night before.

So we did the whole kiss good night thing again and I didn’t talk to her for a bit. There were some other issues, and I wasn’t all that attracted to her in the first place, so I kind of let the friendship reestablish itself. Then, one night, it got vastly weird and I ended the friendship, then her and her friends did something only modern technology would allow them to do, so I put the kabosh on that entire sub-group of friends and then it got more and more weird until there was an absolute non-communication between any of us, though we were all around each other almost every other day, worked together, went to the same parties, bars and had many of the same friends.

And, no, I don’t think she’s a good artist.

Once she and all her friends moved to Brooklyn, none of us really saw each other again. Occasionally I’ll pass a cafe/wine bar we all used to go to and there she is, furiously working away or having a wine.

And if she sees me, we’ll wave.

Occasionally I get a email from her. I email back. Stanford is definitely a good match for her and I now wish her no ill will. They’re moving in together, in fact. He teaches at some small school in the MIdwest. This more than enough satisfies any ill will I’m not admitting to.

But what could I tell my friend? So I said Kizzy and I never had class together (true) and that I didn’t know that much about her art. Sort of true. My opinion on her work is based off a few things I saw, but nothing substantial. I mentioned that I knew she is the personal assistant to this really famous artist (who doesn’t particularly like me, and the feeling’s mutual) and that she’s from somewhere in the South. I forget where she’s from, but it’s somewhere south of the Mid-Atlantic.

Then, I changed topic.

Today, Dorthea asked how my weekend went. I’d planned for a great weekend; a friend of mine is interviewing for a position with a sports league and so spent the weekend with said league. I’d planned on a kick back weekend hanging with my friend, plundering VIP lounges, watching from great seats, having a good time. I ended up being a gigantic dickwad on Friday night, of course apologized, found myself hanging with a some members of a biker gang on Saturday

and then sort of chilling out Sunday at a massive bar with a lot of fucking beers.

Not exactly what I had planned, but then I realized that my buddy is kind of… I don’t know. I don’t want to speak ill of him. I do like him, he’s a fine fellow, but let’s say a friend of yours asked something on par with “Wait, you live in Murray Hill?” after hanging out up to four nights a week for a year… you might stop and wonder what you’ve been talking about for the past while.

Back to the reason behind the post. This Dorthea, she tries to stay in the background at work. Most people in her same department have no clue who she is. She hates almost every last one of them, except she likes manly good looking guys. Hey, we all have our thing. Today, apropos of nothing, she sends this:

dorthea: what? what are you giving me?

3:24 PM you see the photos out loud?

3:25 PM pete went to atlantic city a while ago. got in a car accident. his friends had to go to the hospital. they had tickets to see a fight. and he was torn. but friends said he should go to the fight, not waste the tix. so he went. go there late. this was after dropping off the car at the mechanics and being told it would take 3 days to fix the car–2 more than they’d planned on being there.

fight ended 1/2 a round after he gets there.

somewhat anti-…

so he goes to a strip club.

3:26 PM isn’t into being there. but a dancer sees him. says he looks sad. straddles his lap.

tries to make him feel better. really goes at it. grinding and cooing.

3:27 PM all pete can think about are his friends, the car, the 2 extra days in AC, what he needs to get done in NYC, that he’s missing.

thinking about anything but this chick, who is working really, really hard.

after quite awhile of this, she stops and says, normally, i charge a lot for that, but i could tell you really enjoyed it.

3:28 PM strokes his hair and leaves.

enjoyed it?

me: ha

good story.

dorthea: then he realizes, he had his cell phone in his front pocket the whole time, and she was working really hard at getting it up.

What to do when you get off work early.

I happen to work a lot, but I’m a happy worker.

I, in fact, wonder what to do with myself on weekends. Sure, I like to hang out with friends or be outside, scrambling up rocks or something, but give me a weekend when I don’t have a definite plan and man, I start thinking about what I could do at work.

Thankfully, I have a wide open range of tasks in regards to my career. I can spend a morning fabricating metal or wood

,

fixing a skateboard

,

flirting at a cafe

,

spend my afternoons at lunch meetings

,

or lunch meetings with lots of wine

,

or site tours

,

or at electronic stores

,

or more site tours

,

and then various meetings

,

and flirting with coworkers

,

get in uncomforatable positions to take photographs

,

ride scissor lifts

,

on climb on scaffolding or ladders

(see, the deal is I kind of hate heights),

then afterward, there are work related parties and such

and so on.

I actually started this post yesterday. I was going somewhere with this, but have now forgotten why I put so many images in.

I did see the types of things people are searching for and happen on my blog. In my estimation, I would say there are a few paedophiles out there. I talk about puberty in one post and those searching are looking for something along the lines of puberty, but from a more odious direction: “gay puberty male in shower” / “hung puberty” / “boys showering”.

That said, I’ll never write about puberty again and in fact will change one of the images I found — this great Russky graph of male adolescence from some old text book. It’s now replaced with a picture of a turkey. And, here, I’ll add in a video.

First off, I’m pretty down on child molesters. I’m not much for the death penalty and I’m pretty obviously not into prosecuting “victimless” crime. (One can make all sorts of arguments against that nebulous term of victimless crime, but that’s another post / another time.) That said, I think child rapists should encounter a particularly bleak and lasting life contained in general population of some violent crime centric prison, a life that does not allow for state sanctioned death penalties and only allows for a long and incomprehensible destruction at the hands of the worst murders, rapists and psychopaths. I’m all down for the particularly inhumane torture of those who diddle children.

That said:

HEY, HOW ARE YA?!

()

So getting off work early. What do you do with yourself? I… am lost. And I head to… wait for it, wait for it…

THE BAR.

A buddy of mine met me, we ended up between a few bars, one of which was a truly hidden treasure, described somewhere online as being a good place to make a handful of bad decisions. Perfect. It’s on, ostensibly, a dead end, to the side, set back from the street and in what I think is an old bank building or something. It has a vestibule with a marble floor, then through a doorway and you find a wooden bar all the way down, not much light coming from behind the bar and really the only orangish light coming from the back where two pool tables sit. Though it was Friday (by this time, we’d wasted quite a few hours and it was getting into night), and the place was tight, it’s not too tight to easily move to the washrooms in back. And the washrooms themselves unbosom some more serious past to those sidling up to the old-style urinals set up from the floor and implanted into the wall, those type that start about elbow high and drop all the way down.

My buddy’s friend bought me a drink even though he was a total tool. He’s going to law school. Great, whatever. The girls he was with were varying degrees of friendly and one was super cool. For some reason we decided to change bars and the group dispersed. Fine by me. The place we were headed is some sort of race-fan sausage fest

and my buddy and I ended up at one of my favorite wine bars

where we met a few girls, but no one particularly mind blowing until we both saw this early-stage coug with some tool. Actually the guy was cool, I guess. Sort of drunk and friendly, a loud standard-issue guy. We spent too much time talking to his lady, which at first seemed fine and since I was running wingman, this guy Patrick, he was, sort of bears into me and tells me about women, all the while punctuating his speech with a finger driven into my chest and spilling my sancerre all down my shirt. Funny thing, he apologized each time, but kept doing it. When my buddy and I traded places, I told the woman “You gotta break up with this schmo” and probably something else about how she’s too classy for a guy like that… ’cause I’m classy like that, yo. Instead of smiling, or arguing against me, she gave me a look like “I know.” Bingo. So we do a bit of back and forth, me always reiterating how she’s much better than friend-Patrick over there… and then suddenly, I get swung around and introduced to some hag I’d ignored an hour earlier and there stands my buddy with the hag’s haggy friend. Pat whispers that the girls are wet and want to take any guy home. Mine looks maybe three months pregnant.

Downer.

I do a bit of the chat, then wander off, leaving buddy-boy to fend for himself. The washrooms are packed out, so grab my friend and try to drag him out so I can take a slash in the alley, but he begs off. Strange, he’s still chatting the haggy friend. That’s… cool, but I know I have to rescue the night. After finishing, I go back in and try to pull him away again, but he’s too busy chatting this girl up, so I head out front and perch on some car waiting for him. He finally comes out, leans into me and says “They have pot, beers and want to fuck.”

Well…

I say “Let’s think about this.”

And we lean there and ponder until he says “Pot, beer and fucking, man.”

I ask if he wants to fuck either of those hags. He considers this an amazing counterpoint. I then ask if he wants to smoke out, which neither of us are that into. It’s obvious beer could be more than enough to get us anywhere. Then, he says “Slap me hard.” I do and then he says “What the fuck was I thinking? We got to bail.”

I happen to have let a house across the street in college and know of a secret parking space, and since it’s a fucking trendy street and late enough on a Friday night to be impossible to find parking when we came in, all we have to do now is cross the street and down the alley, turn at a ⊥ alley, c’est ça. But then… from the heavens: “Hey boys!”

We look up and hanging over the roof of this new modern house are two girls in bikini tops.

“Hey ladies!”

They’re having a pool party, and the thing is, I think I know the people who own the house and these ain’t them. They say they’re staying at the house and that’s when I see a dude lean over the edge. Odds are set spinning. Possibility of getting laid high, possibility of an orgy high, possibility of a bit of the ol’ male on male high.

We do a bit more chatting back and forth with the girls and the guy, who has a bit of the gay affect, tries to convince us up. My buddy and I consider, deciding the gay guy won’t mind if we hook up with the girls, almost head over to the side gate and finally decide it’s time to head home.

Shit happens.