like short sleeves, i bear arms

I meant to blog last night before the week started but I got side tracked by a delicious 2 piece KFC combo and finishing the latest Harry Potter book while wearing my wizard's hat and casting a temporal displacement spell so I could read the entire book while avoiding the progression of time, because heaven forbid I let my life slip away from me while I enjoy the final installment of Harry Potter's adventures. Actually who am I kidding, I can't read. Although I did hear that Harry Potter dies at the end, but not before getting buck-naked porno-freaky with Hermione in one of the most graphic literary accounts of a sexual encounter since the depositions during the Lewinsky scandal. I got mine.

So on Friday, as my end of the week tradition dictates, happy hour began calling my name after work and, in a change of scene, I ended up at what I only later deduced to be a gay bar somewhere in Chelsea. I don't quite know what tipped me off though. Maybe it was the fact that there were hardly any women in the bar, and the butch ones that did make an appearance probably had been tagged and released back into the wild for further study and observation. Maybe it was how the bar tender, a middle-aged man who looked like the overweight adult entertainment version of Gene Wilder, called me "sweetie" every time I ordered a drink. Maybe it was the sheer volume of paintings depicting naked young men in various states of arousal, peppering the wall like a strange penile garnish to the tacky neon accented brick decor of the bar's interior. My personal favorite was the guy wearing nothing but a little sailor hat, a white scarf and a smile, like he was part of some naked, gay boating excursion around the world. If it weren't for the bar's $5 2 for 1 special on rather a potent rum and coke, few redeeming qualities would be found here. Anyway, as hilarious as the interior of this bar was on pure sight alone, I should have known that a place presented like this at the outside of my night would only lead to more stories as the alcohol began to flow like the rhymes of Notorious himself.

So I walked up to the bar to collect my second rum and coke, because if I've learned one thing from the Rush Hour movies, it's that a good thing always come with a partner. As I'm waiting for the bar tender to make his way round the horn to me, I overhear the guys sitting at the bar next to me, because at that point, it was either eavesdrop on their conversation or try and drown out the joint's stellar musical atmosphere of "It's Raining Men" with my own thoughts (actually that's a bad example, because I'm sort of a fan of that song. I just wanted to paint the picture that the scene here was gayer than Lance Bass sporting a nice pair of jean shorts and a pink tube top eating a banana... but not just one of those regular bananas, one of those mini bananas. Chew on that for a while.) Anyway, as I'm dropping eaves on these cats next to me, I hear one of them say, "look at this guy and his bowling shirt... I wonder where the lanes are?" uttering a sneer, arrogant laugh at his zigging gibe. After a momentary internal chuckle at the notion that I had just heard a guy discretely heckle someone in a gay bar, thus adding another item to the list of things I never thought I'd ever experience in life, I came to a horrifying revelation. It dawned on me that I, in fact, had explicitly chosen to wear my own black bowling shirt with pink accent triangles this morning (very 50s, very retro, very cool) in honor of my own newly celebrated weekly holiday, Casual Friday. At that point, I was literally floored that I had just been heckled at a gay bar. Like the end of a good knock-knock joke, I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I now have a really good story to tell basically everyone I know, because a tale like this comes along but once in a lifetime. On the other hand, however, I just got insulted by a gay man at a gay bar in Chelsea. And I really liked that shirt too, a shirt which is now tainted, losing the approval I assumed it had already garnered from gay men the world over, being the fly piece of thread that it is.

I just have the one story for tonight. Nothing else of note happened this weekend that can be summed up so anecdotally. As usual, I have a million thoughts milling around in my brain but no cohesive thematic fly paper upon which to stick them. So, these will have to wait another day for their big break, like a struggling New York City artist peddling his work on the corner of streets and avenues. But no matter. In due time, children... in due time. Pound it.

4 out of 5 doctors...