This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- Whining and Dining: Some Thoughts on Eating Out

 Dinner in New York doesn't have a vibe anymore. I don't give two fucks about a mixologist's latest concoction or a Yelp review. I miss walking into places like Lucky Strike and Cafe Noir and Le Singe Vert and Le Deux Gamin and B Bar and Da Silvano (RIP to all of these magical places) and feeling just this incredible buzz and energy. There was a jolt to walking in someplace once. It felt sexual and artistic and international and intriguing. The music was loud, the people were pretty, you could feel the energy of someone famous inside before you even saw who it was. When you walked in the room everyone glanced up to see who just walked in. It was exciting. And usually the food was pretty good. Nothing gives that really anymore. You walk in somewhere and everyone's looking at their phones.

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Wine. It's not that it tastes bad, it's that oenophiles make it seem like these varietals have all these "notes" and "nuances" and it all just tastes mostly the same and not even worthy of really discussing, at least to me. Or maybe I have a peasant's palate. And the amount of money people will part with for it...I just don't get it. Many years ago, when I was a server at one of the hoity doity little boutique restaurants where I would toil for my supper, we would have these wine tastings every week or so. They'd ask us to sip the different bottles we were pushing as specials, describe the "notes" we tasted, and then spit it out in a cup. As if anybody in the weeds with 6 tables full of psychotic rich people has time for describing all of that shit. But that's another conversation. Back to the wine tasting, not only was I not spitting anything out before my shift, but every Cab was a Cab, every Pinot was just another Pinot to me, and so on. I didn't play the game. Well, one day at one of these ridiculous meetings, one of my co-workers said -- and I have no idea if she was trolling or not -- "I'm getting notes of freshly opened Xerox machine paper." And I almost choked. Yet, the somme took her seriously. I'm pretty sure I quit shortly afterwards. I could never last in any of these places for longer than a few months to get me out of whatever financial hole a freelance lapse found me in. Cheers!

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This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- Pride, Schmide

 Okay, so here's my take on Pride. For me, Pride is one of those great ideas like Black Lives Matter that is executed so poorly as to defeat the purpose of its own existence. Because all I see around this annual bacchanal is one big, tired circuit party. The ontz ontz music, the drugs, the cult-like homogeneity...I will never understand what it is about the circuit scene that is so seductive and how it came to be the most emblematic cultural mainstay in the urban gay male experience. It's like this cult or tribe that kidnaps the vulnerable, fragile, beautiful, socially and romantically neglected young and then destroys them with the Faustian promise that they have finally found a home, a family. A community. Then again, I didn't experience feeling like an outsider before I entered this world. At least, not because I knew I craved man butt. Somewhere around 19 I got over the fear of that and just waited for the right time and right guy to do it. It wasn't easy, but I attributed my uniqueness to other things, mostly: to being an artist among future doctors and lawyers and bankers or being the only chip in the cookie, so to speak, in my social network, and an alien around other black folks when my presence around my own culture was required. I always felt a little more clever and worldly than most people around me for living in so many spaces that didn't Venn or intersect or, rather, because I was the Venn or intersection. I moved among the hets with ease, convincing myself I was one until I was just downright bored and horny enough to throw that away and get into the scene. But I never liked the scene. The meanness, the cattiness, the way sex was either thrown at your face or ruthlessly withheld, the obsession with hotness when I had for so long been trying to perfect coolness. In the gay scene, I didn't feel I belonged. I still don't. I just wanted a dude. To this day, I don't really care for much more from it and nearly 30 years after first stepping into a gay bar, I've watched little good come out of that world and a lot get eaten alive by it. I wish we'd worry more about how our culture eats its own young than what corporate sponsor wants to pander to this community's increasingly bottomless need for mainstream acceptance. That said, I didn't necessarily earn being gay so I can't say I'm proud to be. And as the culture becomes increasingly "queer" and gender obfuscating and obsessed with drag queens, I don't even know if I am as gay as I am simply same-sex loving. But I wouldn't trade it because I very much like who I am. And I don't need Bud Light or Target or a parade or being tweaked out and dancing shirtless in a tribal sea of identically insecure people to reinforce that and neither should anyone else.