Weekend of the Moroccan Dancing Boy

[I'm sure I stole, avant la lettre, that title from Max, who's wending his way back to Santa Barbara even as I write. Too bad you're not technologically advanced enough to blog from Amtrak, girl.]

[Max and I were meeting to head up to the Russian River (me for the third time this summer, a record) to visit our mutual college buddy Chris and his huzzband Mark at their sylvan nest just outside Guerneville. We knew going in there'd be drinking, sunburn by a semi-public gay pool (definition: no charge for admission; drinks are sold; but clothing is worn), gentle debauchery, and lots and lots of trash talk. What I didn't know was just how fun it would be.]

[There's something about going up there that I find almost inordinately therapeutic. First, the redwoods. Counting the March trip to Mendocino, I've been to or thru the ruddy trees four times this year. Just smelling the air brings back good childhood memories, and getting out of the grit and noise of the city - especially when things here are complicated, as they always seem to be - to the primeval quiet melts tension wherever it's carried.]

[Just as refreshing is the human element. First, Chris and Mark are great. Boozy, to be sure, but totally comfortable in their skins, completely hospitable, and just hilarious. I don't know if you've noticed, but Being Witty in the City can carry a real edge that can cross a line to painful when you least expect it. We're all keeping our teeth sharp like Margo Channing, and it's exhausting. While there was no shortage of badinage of the truly raunchy sort up there (especially when Max and Chris really got going...oh, my), it was never mean-spirited in a way I notice here more and more.]

[Lastly of course is the sexual charge in the air. Guerneville is the West Coast's Provincetown or Fire Island, in case you need to be told; you can imagine that when the boys get some fresh air and potent cocktails into them, their minds turn...to the same thing they were already thinking about. My impression, though, is of drastically reduced sense of competition, of desperation, of attitudes and the inferiority complexes that underlie them. Friendly libidos attached to every type of body swing in the breeze, content to take what comes, if it comes, and mostly just as content if it doesn't. It's what the bears want to achieve but clearly have not. (Thanks, AYM.)]

[You know by now that I'm talking at least as much about myself as I am about the River. And as good as the string of weekends I had up there were (and they were), you know that one slightly negative episode here on Thursday and Friday, with follow-up this morning, is harshing my buzz to a stupid level. One is really trying to remember Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." Fifteen positive vibes + one negative one = you don't want to know.]

[Never mind that; it will fade, as will the weekend's substantial afterglow. One good thing that I've not seen among other bloggers' wrap-ups of Summer 2006: in San Francisco, Labor Day marks the beginning of our Real Summer. For about the next month and a half, we can count on warmer temperatures than we've had heretofore. Since Seasonal Affective Disorder becomes more noticeable as I get older, this is a very good thing.]

[Especially since the dancing boy turned out to be Brazilian, not Moroccan as we'd speculated...]

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