Nolle Prosequi

I'm slowly getting my pics downloaded and blogged. Put up some surf pics yesterday, and plan to finish Istanbul and Tim's wedding tonight. That should do it, until I hit the road again.

And I have the travel bug bad. Heading to Sydney in a few weeks. I still haven't heard from my buds down there ... hopefully my emails are getting through. And I just wasted my lunch hour plotting out where to go next. One benefit of state work is, I get plenty vacation time. I don't think I've ever had this much. Or if I did, I had it but it was illusory, & impossible to take.

No more. This kid is ready to see the world. Summer I have my sister's wedding in Asheville, and I'll pull a week in New York [and hopefully Fire Island] before or after. And in the fall ... who knows. Right now the fantasy is Mexico. Hollis mentioned doing a road trip around Puerto Vallarta or Cancún in the fall ... and that was all I needed to hear to start fantasizing and budgeting vacation hours. Today's vision: a week road trip around Jalisco, then wrap-up at Latin Fever 9 in Puerto Vallarta. Maybe I'll finally learn some Spanish.

Of course, two days ago I was picturing Mayan ruins and the Playa del Carmen outside Cancún ...

And I've got a new favorite word... Nolle Prosequi. It's Latin for Michael doesn't have a warrant out for him.

The Good Life

I just updated the links to my travel plans, and things are looking pretty good. This could be a very good year.

Brokeback Mountain

Some Reasons I won't be seeing Brokeback Mountain anytime soon ...

- Everyone tells me I must see it. I hate this kind of hype, and I hate being told I must see or do anything.

- The second sentence out of everyone's mouth [after you must see it] is the cinematography is wonderful. Yawn. This is as deadly as telling me that the special effects are amazing. I don't go to movies for cinematography or CGI. I go for good stories.

- The third sentence is usually well, you should see it for political reasons. And this one almost works with me. Sure, I want to see homos in the movies. I want these kinds of movies to succeed. But why this flic? Why not Capote? It was complex, disturbing, powerful, superbly acted and written, and tres tres gay. So You Think You Can Dance was the gayest show in network television history, yet it was ignored by the velvet mainstream.

- If this were a straight love story I would have absolutely zero desire to see it.

Gah.

I might see it. I might even like it. But I'll wait until the hype dies down a bit.

Where Did Everybody Go?

Black socks and single gay men are both disappearing at an alarming rate. I'm down to three pairs of socks for work. I don't know where they all went - I keep buying them, and they keep going AWOL. Either someone in our neighborhood has a strange fetish and is stealing them from the laundry room, or there is a wormhole in my closet.

But missing socks are common. We all deal with it. But now men have started to disappear, and I'm getting worried. Maybe there's now a wormhole in the sauna. Something is taking them. 24 Hour Fitness used to look like gay happy hour pau hana time. Now there's rarely more than two or three of us. I talked to the guys at Golds and the Y, but the men aren't there either. The Surf Club has faded. Five or so guys go regularly, but none on Saturday mornings. Max's has been haunted solely by creepy old men lately. My boys aren't there. Hulas still draws a crowd, and Angles is still packed with drunks. But where is my old crowd? I went dancing over New Years, and Michael Fong is an excellent DJ but even he couldn't pull the old crowd in.

So where did they all go? Is it my age? The times? The right-wing war on gays, Arabs, and anyone else who won't bow down before them?

And now that I write that ... I think that's it. Because I hear the same thing LA to NY to Sydney: the clubs, the parties, the life - it all seemed to peak a few years ago. Let's hope it comes back soon.

As for my New Years weekend, I didn't get off island like I had hoped.
I stayed put, and had a nice emotional roller coaster of a weekend.
There was no major drama, just the basic me vs. myself. [I won]. 
[I think].Alan Hanaike had a big and casual house party for NYE,
and everyone was cool and laid back and it was Hawaii at its best.
I went to an after hours party that didn't quite reach critical mass.
I had been kind of hoping to hook up that weekend & there wasn't
even any *potential* single man there and I crashed.  Sunday was all 
what am I doing in Hawaii? and is this my life? and ten years from
now will I be sitting here in this same
exact spot with the same exact life? and brothers, it wasn't pretty.

I guess 40 hit harder than I thought it would.