The thing with an Irish Car Bomb is that you're supposed to drop the Bailey's-and-Jameson shot into the half pint of Guinness, and then chug it all as fast as you can. Emphasis on the "chug it all as fast as you can."

You know, before it curdles.

This we learned last night at Rob's book party, where everyone eyed me with more than a healthy dose of distrust as I ordered a round. Deidre was the first to chug it all, proudly displaying her empty glass for me to inspect. But most everyone else stood there, wrinkled noses and all, watching the concoction as it slowly transformed into a vile brew the taste of three-day-old vomit.

We were all there to celebrate Rob's new book: Byrne and Bob and Deidre and Glenn and Derrick and Atticus and Michael and Nicole and quite a few others. Even Greg showed up towards the end, all fresh from a work event and ready to be fawned over. It was an early night by all counts, it being Monday and people having dinner plans and needing to meet their boyfriends and having to fly to London the following morning and all. In the end, Bob, Glenn, Derrick, Greg and I were left, everyone still making fun of my Irish Car Bomb and its most spectacularly dismal failure.

I don't know, I had chugged mine. And then two more. And everyone was right: the longer you waited, the more and more vile it became.

I'll have to remember that the next time I order a round of these. Drop and chug as fast as you can.

Before it curdles.

Somehow or the other though, I don't think I'll ever be given a chance for redemption. I don't think the boys'll ever let me order that again. Ever again.

Just a wild, wild guess.

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Pride weekend come and gone. Just like that.

Pride weekend was quiet, Pride weekend was uneventful. No big parties, no dancing on the pier. No drinking all night long with the boys, no setting sail with friends, no dancing down the streets of Manhattan. No parade for me.

A sudden and desperate depression overtook me this weekend, a strange melancholy that I couldn't quite shake. It was, I later told Greg, like working on Christmas day where everyone was celebrating--everyone but me. It started Friday night, an uneasy feeling of loneliness and inconsolable despondency that lasted through Sunday, and that came and went with the flightiness of an uneven-tempered child.

I wasn't sure what to expect this weekend, the weekend where all the gay boys and girls were having the run of the city. I guess I expected to feel loved more somehow. I guess I expected to feel a weight of some sort lifted off my shoulders and tossed to the wind. I guess I expected a high. And when none of that materialised, when none of the happiness and wonderfulness and joyfulness came to pass, I sank deep. Excessive joy is a drug.

Now that the weekend is over, I feel a peculiar sense of relief. It's perhaps too strong to say I feel a happiness returning, but I sense the dark depression lifting. In hindsight, I had a wonderful weekend. In hindsight, I was just being greedy for joy. Excessive joy, as I said, is a drug.

Pride weekend for me wasn't partying and drinking and parading and being silly. It might have been what I had originally wanted--and a desperate want at that--but it wasn't what I got.

Pride weekend for me was Caroline, or Change with Kip and Henry and Greg. Pride weekend for me was a disco nap and a midnight trip to the diner, just Greg and me and the white moon overhead. Pride weekend was brunch with my mother, and dusting off the bicycles and riding through the park with Greg, making jokes about how much we'd later ache and how much we missed riding our bikes and how much in trouble we were because we'd ridden too far in the beautiful sunshine and the cool breezes and how we were in danger of losing steam before getting back home. Pride weekend was laughing with Greg and giggling with Greg and wrestling with Greg and telling him how much I love him.

And really, isn't that what it's all about, in the end?

Pride weekend come and gone. Just like that. And in hindsight, to be really, really honest, it was pretty damn good.

Happy Pride weekend, all.

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Click-clack, click-clack. The Green Mountain Flyer picked up speed as it left the Bellows Falls station, its ancient diesel locomotive pulling us lazily towards Chester Depot. Saturday afternoon Jess and Marc joined us for the Green Mountain Railroad's inaugural summer run. Forty-five minutes each way, the restored 1930s coaches rattled and wheezed as we watched in silence, old New England passing us by in the sunshiny cool summer breeze.

We took Friday off from work and headed to Vermont for a long weekend, speeding north as fast as we could Friday morning to beat the traffic. It was a lazy weekend as most weekends go, full of us doing nothing but sitting about and playing boardgames, studying the expanse of sky and sighing at the setting sun. It was about all I could take, having gone out Thursday night for a few drinks with Matt, Bob, Glenn, Derrick and Ron. Poor Marc, he seemed disappointed that I could down only three of his low-carb martinis Friday night.

Saturday at two and the four of us are zoned out on the train. The baby in the seat ahead of us wears a conductor's hat, blue stripes on crisp white. Everywhere the train goes, people wave. The mothers with their children at the Bellows Falls Station, they wave; the boaters with their scuba gear on the Connecticut, they look up and they wave; the kids fishing at the Williams River, they all smile and wave as we go clicking-clacking by. Click-clack, click-clack. Click-clack, click-clack. Every time the train blows its whistle, the old couple sitting ahead of us look to each other and grin.

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I went hoping for gratuitous skin. A few growls here, a few snarls there, a bit of overexposed chest, sweat rolling off backs and shoulders and necks, and sufficient amounts of unwarranted flexing to make a nice boy moist enough to stick to his seat. He was to spend two hours thrashing Necromongers on Helion after a narrow escape from Crematoria, sweating and grunting and making me all hot and flustered and wondering if it suddenly got hot in here. I went to see Vin Diesel's latest over the weekend, equipped with my army of very personal fantasies and a bucket large enough to hold three gallons of drool. So understand my very real concern when I looked over to my left and identified what seemed to be a cheery-eyed seven-year old munching on a pack of Goobers.

What's that whooshing sound, you ask? Oh nothing, just my wet dreams flying out the window.

I dug deep into my inner self searching for the mystical power I convinced myself I was supposed to have learned from a yoga session five years ago, breathing and focusing and pretending the little boy with the Goobers wasn't really there. It almost worked. Somewhere in the middle of the movie, somewhere amidst all the muscles and tank tops and flexing of biceps and inappropriate touching of bald heads, I began to relax. I began to forget about the little cheery-eyed boy and his insufferable Goobers. Then somewhere mid-flex Vin snarled a line of dialogue in the delightfully snarly way he does, and my toes began to curl. "There's only one way out of here," he said. My mind began licking the sweat off his naked chest.

A tiny voice piped up to my left. "I know! My way!" it exclaimed.

And there, in that one nanosecond it was gone. That was it. The little cheery-eyed boy had not only very efficiently and very completely obliterated my fantasies but had given away the punch line. I carefully uncurled my toes, and as I glared at him with all the hate I could humanly muster, he smiled and clapped and popped another Goober into his sweet, cheery-eyed face. I'll be looking for the little fucker's mother soon for a return of my ten bucks and my dignity.

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Greg started the South Beach diet a couple days ago, cutting his carb and sugar intake and trying to eat better in general. As a vote of solidarity I made a silent pledge that I too would better my eating habits. It's harder to do it than it seems. It was hard doing it yesterday, and it's hard doing it right now.

There's hardly a soul at the office today. And as is the case on days like today, days where the office is quiet and the few of us here are twiddling our collective thumbs, we convinced our boss to order us lunch. The Reagan funeral was on CNBC when lunch arrived, salad and roast beef and chicken and tuna and a platter of delightful desserts. Everyone was glued to the tv, watching the spectacular pageantry that is a presidential funeral, oohing and aahing and making comments about this head of state and that dignitary. I grabbed a tuna sandwich and joined them.

Many in the gay blogging community have negative feelings towards Reagan and what he stood for. I have conflicting feelings, oblivious as I was when Reagan was president of the issues now dear to me. When Reagan was president, I was a teenager on a tiny Caribbean island, unaware of my budding sexuality and much less so of the political issues surrounding it. I simply looked to Reagan as the leader of a country I longed to be a part of, the leader of a people and an ideal I so deeply venerated. And that was that. Nothing more, nothing less. Now I have conflicting emotions. I'm being told I should worship him for being a god. I'm being told I should despise him for his policies. One of these days I'll resolve these conflicting feelings. One of these days, but not now.

Right now all I can think of is that tray of desserts sitting on the center cabinet. All I can think of is the handsome chocolate brownie there calling my name. All I can think of is saying no.

It's all about solidarity.

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Just got out of a long, stressful, exhausting meeting where to my utter dismay the term "weird-ass CMO" was used.

Repeatedly.

Please excuse me while I go slap some sense into somebody.

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Pelicans and herons and dolphins and egrets. Bottle palms and foxtail palms and coconut trees and palmetto. Ice cream and frozen bananas and warm white sand. Hot, hot sun. Cold, cold beer. Tee shirts and shorts and suntan lotion. Flip flops. Late nights drives with the windows down, soaking in the salty sea air and watching the full moon sparkle on the waters speeding by on the left and on the right.

We've been in Clearwater, Florida since Wednesday, here for Greg's cousin's wedding on Saturday. It's certainly a change of pace from the northeast. A most welcome change indeed. Pictures here.

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There are few things that calm the mind as sufficiently and as immediately as a few days in the countryside. Something about the Vermont landscape does that to me. I am sitting in a corner of the living room as I write this, watching the stillness in the greens of the pine and maple and elm and the scraggly blanket of ferns that grows quiet and without urgency on the hillside slopes. In the distance, the tiny red roofs of the farms sit in silence as they always do, muted by a gentle mist settling in the valley below. To my left, a little chipmunk darts about from rock to rock, exploring the remnants of our bonfire now two days old.

We built the fire Saturday to ward off the evening chill, tossing into it the twigs and branches we had collected all afternoon. Some of the longer twigs we saved for toasting marshmallows, impaling the confections at the tips and setting aflame as one of the ingredients in the strange and delightful treat Americans call smores. As the evening wore on, and when the recipe had become more complicated than it was worth, we ate the toasted marshmallows whole, giggling as they stuck to the roofs of our mouths.

The weather has been moody this weekend. The two days of sunshine and brilliant sunsets gave way to an unseasonable chill with the rains that finally reached us last night. I'm not complaining though: I love these days as much as I do the sunny ones. These moody days make for equally moody nights, perfect for as few things as bundling up under warm blankets with cups of hot peppermint tea and listening to nothing but the rains drone in mindless percussion.

It's just started to rain a little again. I can't hear the drops just yet, but I see the telltale circles of wetness on the rocks outside, and I motion to Greg to come back indoors. He is busy seeding the ground with some wildflower seeds we bought today at the local hardware store. Blue flax and snapdragons and daisies and primroses and poppies the can says. He grins and ignores me, and I grin back in return. It's been that kind of lazy weekend. It's been the kind of weekend I've been looking forward to for quite some time, the kind that, like the change of seasons and the change in weather it brings, refreshes and reinvigorates. It's been the kind of weekend that just hits the spot. I lift my head and listen in earnest: somewhere in the woods, just beyond the little clearing to the south, a little bird has begun to sing.

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