Internet Dating for Married People

Um, okay, we got drunk and perused the listings on craigslist with a friend who is not married. She thought it might be fun to find someone who could be interesting and attentive and worthwhile. We thought it would be good for her to snag a man with all those qualities, and maybe more. She was drunk the first time she looked, and she only found one posting that seemed moderate. I never saw the posting, so I can't elaborate. But I am told it was free of photos of genitalia. That alone set the man apart and above all other offerings.

After some correspondence, our friend gained access to additional information. The correspondent offered pictures of himself in drag and a link to his personal website. Although I'm tempted to link here, I won't, because I just can't out people like that. Although I could. But I won't. Maybe later. And only if my friend says it's okay. And I think she will because their brief internet conversation has ended as of today.

Regarding the website: I uttered three words upon my initial introduction to it. Hmm. Wow. Really? I didn't use any enthusiastic punctuation in my speech either. Here was a man who knew how to tuck and roll. I wondered if this explained the absence of penis pictures. Maybe it was stuck way up high in the crack, inaccessible after too many bouts of binding.

There were other pictures too. Other women all dressed up like they were in drag too. Nothing natural or beautiful, to my aesthetic. It all looked like super-goth glamorama at burning man to me.

I suppose we all have our interests, idiosyncracies, reasons for existence. I told my friend, "well, it could be fun to hang with him." And I meant it. He was a heterosexual man with a few self-proclaimed talents that not everyone can own. He can apply false lashes, slide on fishnets without ripping them, and pose unabashedly spread eagle on linoleum floors for his own camera. I admit that I can't do any of that.

As it turned out, he was kind of funny. But it all petered out in the end. He started to talk about the color of his pubic hair, without invitation. When my friend decided to ditch him, he wrote back: "I am obviously decent; otherwise, why would all those naked women pose for me?" She didn't write back.

Over the Weekend

I had one of those noise-making, confetti-tossing, drink-slurping and smoke-smoking weekends. It was long. I ended up exhausted. By Sunday, when I couldn't sleep in because I felt dizzy and achy and anxious that someone would show up with another bottle of something or other, I was grumpy. As it turned out, we were invited to brunch.

The cab took us to Union Square, but the restaurant was not there. Not even close. I closed my eyes and took a call from my mother while the cab honked uselessly at stopped cars ahead. As I talked to my mother, I noticed the volume on the radio creeping higher and higher, until I could hear the 49ers and the Raiders-- the driver flipped back and forth-- more clearly than my worrying mom.

No drinks at brunch, but the talk wandered to sex, as it does when tablemates are not actually mating. I learned about a sex club and before I could ask enough questions to satisfy my prurient interest, the conversation turned to our next proposed outing. The table had conferred as I had let my mind wander, and suddenly, we were scheduled for a romp, or at least some romp observation, at a sex club.

Brunch ended nicely, with pleasantries and promises to discuss appropriate outfits. I said I would do laundry, and I got laughs for it. I meant, I would do laundry that afternoon, but I suppose I would rather be clean than stinky at a sex club too. Except that I had and have no intention of going.

Don't Pick

This is a cautionary shout out to all my peeps out there who chew, pick and otherwise mangle and mutilate the digits and nails of hands and feet. Don't do it. Don't nibble, bite, tear, rip. Leave your fingers and toes alone. Sound the alarm if you find your fingers crossed and inching toward an obsessive poke or pull of dead skin left dangling from a torn cuticle. Slap at your own hands. Sit on them. But don't pick.

I watched a train full of grown-ups picking and pulling and tasting and gnarling the tips of fingers this morning. As I watched, I counted. There was a grey-hair in an argyle sweater who kept his pointer trapped between his uppers and lowers. Do dentures have decent grip? He worked on it from Castro to Van Ness, when I stepped off the car. A woman with a weave and long nails sucked alternately on her ring finger and thumb, maybe cleaning the underside of her long nails or enjoying the rigid nail cave's feel on a cankersore? I took my own hands off the shiny aluminum bar and focused on balancing while I watched all these spitty fingers enter and re-enter mouths. I put my hands in my pockets and leaned heavily against the door until I could get off the train, climb the stairs without use of the banister, ascend the escalator with hands still stuck in the lint of my old rain coat, and get to work where I washed my hands, inspected my fingernails and got to work.

Don't pick. It's not healthy.

Accepting Candy from Strangers

We both carved pumpkins and lit candles inside them. I looped garlands of plastic spiders and rats through the banister and along the eaves of our front porch. I sprinkled our slate steps with creepy crawlies, purchased twenty bucks worth of candy and grabbed a beer. We considered playing music out the window, but the night was fairly still and crisp. The sound of children shreiking from house to house was sharper in the silence.

We waited on our porch with buckets of candy. And we waited.

We waited as we watched kids climbed stairs of neighboring houses, collected their bounty, and skipped past our house, parents in tow, to the house next door. What? We shook our pumpkin buckets of candy. We stood up and sat down. We walked down the steps to see the house from the sidewalk, confirm that it was well-lit, and walked back up, avoiding the plastic centipedes and skulls, to sit on the porch.

And we waited. Kids approached, considered and veered away. We had only four trick-or treaters demand candy, but many others who didn't even ask. I started to wonder, even if we are eager, and even if they don't know us, and we are strangers, isn't Halloween the night when we, as American children, bravely cast aside our fears to get the candy, no matter what the cost? When I was little, candy may have been laced with razor blades, arsenic, codeine, rat poison. But still, we went to every house, light or dark, and we begged for whatever they might give us because something was better than nothing. And if it was nothing, we could toilet paper the house later.

We ended up with two full buckets of Halloween candy that I didn't want to eat. We left the house and walked to the Castro with our dog. The seven policemen at the barricade told us that no dogs would be permitted inside the militarized zone, an area otherwise known as the Castro Halloween Party. It was also quiet, but eerily so. Two hundred thousand people corralled into the street, shoulder to shoulder, were making little noise because there was no music or entertainment to outdo. We tried to hand out candy to partygoers, half of whom accepted eagerly, the other half unwilling to accept candy from strangers.

Later, we learned that 10 kids between the ages of 15 and 25 had been shot after a minor altercation started. I thought about these kids, and wondered if they would have taken our candy with a smile like some people did, or whether they would have passed it up. I wondered if we could have just gotten to them, and given them the entire bucket of candy, whether maybe things could have been different. Maybe they could have just tossed leftover candy at each other instead of aiming and shooting bullets at others' heads. That's what we would have done, or, I guess, would still do. What a shame.