Viva La Tomatina!

	Don't ask why. Just grab some goggles and dive in. [cellar.org]

Yesterday was the date of this year's Tomatina, a marvelous little festival in Buñol, Spain, a half-hour train ride west of Valencia. On the last Wednesday of every August, this little village puts on a week-long, tomato-themed party, set around the feast of its patron saint, and closes it all out with the world's biggest food fight. Most out-of-towners show up just for this last part.

It is an event that occupies a large and happy spot in my heart because seven years ago I was there.

My partner, our roommate Mike and his sister Claudia jumped at the chance to see the tomato festival that year when Mike read about it in Details. It was just a single-paragraph brief with a little picture, tucked in the corner of the page — and we planned an entire 17-day road trip through southeastern Spain around that date in August 1999.

We saw major cultural landmarks — Alhambra, the walled medieval city of Toledo, breathtaking Gaudí architecture in Barçelona, the mosque-cathedral of Cordoba — but really... really, we threw tomatoes.

A veritable Who's Who of nations are represented at this obscure food fi— er... I mean festival. [sol.com]

This modest, sleepy village of roughly 10,000 swells to a tourist destination of more than 30,000, transforming literally overnight into a cosmopolitan mecca drawing Spaniards, Americans, Australians, Brits, Italians, Germans — everyone.

I'll set the scene: Imagine thousands and thousands of men and hundreds of women, nearly naked, writhing in a river of crushed tomatoes.

Here's a fairly decent presentation of the fight online.

	Hot guys. Hot girls. Plus it's a legitimate cultural expereience. We all get an A+! [kiwiblog.co.nz]

A legion of foreigners trickles into town, making make their way from the train station to the center of town like ants converging on a potato chip. Meanwhile, the locals spend most of the morning covering their windows, doors, balconies and storefronts with tarps, sheets of plastic, nets and mosquito screens. Many of them stand in their doorways and on their balconies, silently watching the passing visitors, waiting.

When a crowd of suitable size has amassed, the locals dump buckets of water and turn garden hoses on the crowd, priming everyone for the mêlée to come. T-shirts slide off and get tucked into waistbands. The less patient among the masses tie their shirts into knotted projectiles and send them sailing back and forth above the crowd.

(Getting hit in the face by a heavy soaked wad of clothing hurts like hell. It's an experience I don't hesitate, strongly, to not recommend.)

There is some noise and nervous chatter. From time to time, when a resident lets loose again with a garden hose, the affected segment of the crowd cheers. But mostly everyone is waiting for the sound of a gun shot.

Peristalsis [mediterraneocentre.com]

And then it starts. Enormous dump trucks filled with tomatoes come rumbling slowly up the narrow streets. A brave few scramble up the sides of the cargo holder and dive in, tossing out handfuls of loose fruit to prime the pump. The crowd is so thick that it takes time to make a space in front of the trucks and close in again behind them. Some of the streets are so narrow, the process looks like peristalsis, people pressing themselves against the walls of the buildings to let the trucks pass. And then the trucks stop and raise their loads and dump their cargo (and any instigators inside). And the fracas begins.

Those closest to the piles of tomatoes scramble forward and make short work of them, tossing handfuls in all directions. They spread out like a ripple in a lake. Waves of tomatoes wash across the crowd as people begin assaulting each other in earnest.

Some folks crush them before tossing. Others good-naturedly pelt their neighbors with whole, solid fruit. It is considered bad form to throw the hard, unripe, green ones. They remain on the ground, mostly. An expression of good will.

	Not quite deep enough for a backstroke. [kiwiblog.co.nz]

Soon there is nothing solid to throw. The tomatoes have been reduced to an impromptu river of sauce running down the street. The late-summer sun beats down on shimmering bare backs, chests, arms, shoulders. People sludge here and there, kicking chunks in all directions. Shoes come off, or get stuck in the sucking holes of mud-like tomato slop.

No one is spared. Claudia attempts to climb a street lamp to get some aerial shots of the chaos. But the crowd isn't having it. She becomes an easy target, and a barrage of fruit (as well as a desire to not destroy her rather nice camera) soon persuades her to come back down.

Give it to me, baby! [spanish-in-spain.es]

In the chaotic movement of bodies, a young man cups his hands and scoops great splashes of marinara at me, a complete stranger, then stands there, arms back, chest puffed out, in a gesture that says: "OK, now you hit me!" His intention is as clear as crystal. Plus he's hot. So I comply. No one speaks. No one is from here; and no one would understand each other anyway. There is no language here. There are only tomatoes.

Then a second series of trucks comes through, restarting the whole process.

Then a third.

	Viva la tomatina! [guardian.co.uk]

We are completely engulfed in tomato pulp. Hair is matted down, slicked back or spiked into insane formations, depending on length. Red muck slides down our faces, into our mouths. Our ears are ringing because they are filled with tomato sludge. Splashed tomato gets up our noses. We can't rub our eyes with our filthy hands, so we rely on reflexes (or swim goggles) to avoid being blinded. Naked torsos glide past naked torsos. We slip and slide across each other.

Then there is a second gun shot. The throbbing horde stops. And the locals once again have at us with their hoses. The crowd filters out of the town center through alleyways and back streets into larger clearings and squares. Buñol comes out en masse to rinse us off. Dripping participants queue up to get a quick hose-down. We gather up what clothing we can.

As we wait for the hose, pulpy chunks, seeds and bits of skin cling to everything and everyone in sight. The late-summer sun bakes it to our skin, and we begin to itch in uncomfortable places. The air is heavy with the bouquet of tomato, sweat and sun-tanned skin. And the walls and streets in all directions look like the sides of a Cuisinart.

I find it funny that nearly every building in town is painted some variety of white.

No one seems to know why this festival exists. It's been around since the '40s. I've heard that it originally had something to do with a protest against the Franco regime. I've heard it started with an accidentally upturned vetegable cart that resulted in a public food fight that was so much fun the locals decided to do it again the next year.

	It's a heckuva lot better than getting run down by some bulls! [guardian.co.uk]

Maybe there doesn't need to be a reason. It's enough that people from all over the world come for a single, meaningless purpose. It's a fantastic expression of community and good will and unity. Just good clean fun, metaphorically.

It's not so clean. I got the worst ear ache of my life in the days that followed. (I could see in my shadow that my misshapen ear was standing out an extra inch or more from my head!) I'm sure it's from an infection I picked up in the melange of tomato sauce, street filth, and thousands of bodies' worth of human germs that streamed down my face for the better part of an hour.

But it was the best ear ache of my life. And, for the record, as far as obscure Spanish festivals go, I'd rather risk my short-term health in a tomato fight than risk my life getting chased by a bunch of bulls.

More Gayness

When I came out nigh on 11 years ago, I vowed to resist the temptations of the dark side and to use my powers only for the forces of good, but yesterday I inadvertently grossed out two little kids.

Sometimes when you're gay, and you say good night to a gay friend, you give him a little kiss. Sometimes, after one too many at the bar, you give him a big one. Sometimes, less frequently, he might lay a good one on you — with some full-on tongue action if you're lucky.

In my world this is normal.

In the world of the little boys who captured the moment in their Fujicolor memories, it is not.

I was vaguely aware that they were posed behind me at the corner, standing with their dirt bikes leaning against their thighs, having just crossed the street. They had seen us, stopped still and went silent.

Then one of them piped up, "Ew! Oh geez! Those boys just kissed." His friend said nothing.

First, I thought, what are these two kids doing out on their bikes at this time of night?

Then I was transported back to my elementary school playground, the site of much juvenile character assassination, where the tombstones of egos are lined up along the edge of the blacktop.

He wasn't even making fun of us, but for a half a second his reaction got to me.

Mustn't ... kiss ... a boy. Going ... to hell.

I'd been there so often before, and on both sides. I don't remember ever being teased for being a homo in school. But I definitely was teased for other things, abundant athletic ineptitude being chief among them. But what is worse is that I — in fact I — did tease other kids about being homos.

Shame hung like the limp shadow of a memory, waiting for me to notice, draw it around my shoulders and wear it home with me.

But I left it hanging there. I turned and walked away, the kid calling out behind me, insistent that somebody hear him, "Ohmygod, gross! Those boys just kissed!"

I didn't have to turn around. I didn't have to look at him. Let him see what happens at the corner of 12th and A at 1 a.m., I thought. Let him remember it, and let his shock fade away to nothing.

Alarm

There are plenty of unpleasant ways to wake up, nevermind that most of the time waking up is unpleasant on its face.

One can be shaken awake or startled into consciousness by an alarm or a bell or a loud clock or a gunshot — depending on one's neighborhood. One can be temporarily blinded by the sun through a drawn curtain. One can fall out of bed to a hard, cold floor below. One can be aurally assaulted by barnyard creatures. One can be woken by a restless bed partner or a carelessly noisy roommate.

Or, one can be woken up as I was today.

I was wrenched to sudden, desperate consciousness at 5:40 a.m. when I threw up in my mouth and began to choke. Huck! Gasp! Kack!, I said — Huck! Gasp! Kack! — Huck! Gasp! Kack! Seriously, I could not catch my breath. I was scared awake more than anything else. Could I have suffocated on my own vomit? What a crappy way to go. I had exactly two thoughts at that moment: 1.) This is like the first five minutes of a Six Feet Under episode; and 2.) Don't wake Jeff!

When I could finally breathe, I realized how gross it all was and spent the next few minutes desperately trying to clean my mouth out.

Then I enjoyed a delightful assortment of chewable, fruit-flavored antacid tablets for breakfast before retiring to the couch.

No more pizza at 1 a.m.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today, this blog turns one year old. For he's a jolly good fellow, and all that... and many happy returns.

Or, many happy enters. Depends on the keyboard, I guess.

Good-Bye, Pluto!

	Pluto and Charon skulk off to a dark corner of the solar system to pout about their demotion. Charon has reportedly threatened to "kick Earth's ass." [Gene Smith's Astronomy Tutorial]

I never learned the mnemonic device to remember the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. I remember the lines of the treble clef scale are the notes E, G, B, D and F, because Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge, but I was never aware that My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas.

And it's a good thing, too. I might have wasted a lot of time memorizing this, because it's all quite useless now!

Dictionary researchers might all now breathe a sigh of relief, but sentimentalists are already having a hard time adjusting to the new order. Because we finally have a workable definition for "planet," some scientists meeting in Prague have decided to strip Pluto of its planetary status. Pluto and its primary satellite Charon are now "dwarf planets." I think they're calling these itty-bitty planetoids "plutons," in honor of the recently defrocked rock. You know, a consolation prize. No one goes home empty-handed!

Ah, Pluto, you've been a good sport all these years. Thanks for playing.

Early reports indicate that Pluto is coping well with the news. "It's not what we were hoping for, obviously," the stunned celestial body said, "but life goes on. We'll get through it all right. I just want to be with my family now."

The move means a considerably greater loss to Charon, which has less graciously accepted the news. Charon is only a satellite, and now it's not even the satellite of a planet. Charon, loyal to Pluto to the bitter end, has retracted earlier threats that it would "kick Earth's ass."

"It was said in the heat of the moment. I'm sorry. At least I'm not a lousy moon, I guess," Charon said. "But what am I?"

No longer can our very excellent mother send us pizzas. Now she must instead send us none. Or nowhere. Or maybe noodles. Because Neptune is now officially the furthest planet from the sun in our solar system.

Apparently we were laboring without a definition of "planet" all this time. I don't remember having any difficulty with the subject in elementary science classes. In fact, I'm sure I've taken tests that contained questions assuming a definition the word. Hey — I want those tests re-audited! This may affect my academic performance in retrospect all the way up through college admission. Maybe I could have gotten into an ivy league school. I'll sue!

Truly, I don't understand what the fuss is about. This is not a surprise. Pluto doesn't care. It's unlikely that there are any life forms on the pla— oops, dwarf planet — who would care, as Pluto only has an atmosphere for 20 years every 248 years. It's still out there, happily, ignorantly dancing with Charon, waving to us — "Don't forget about me, schoolchildren of Earth! You haven't seen the last of me yet!"

What Are You Looking At?

I took great comfort this morning in the fact that, when I caught myself staring at a woman's ass this morning on the F train, it was not her ass that I was contemplating but the stitching on her back pockets. This is absolutely true, and a perfectly legitimate subject of homosexual male interest.

Lord... if someone had called me on it, I would have been far less embarrassed by my staring at a woman's butt than my staring at a woman's butt. I hope no one saw me. As Hollywood said in the tragically unrerrated Andrew McCarthy/Kim Cattrall star-maker Mannequin: "I have a reputation to uphold."

Finally! Something Decent on Television

LONDON (Reuters) — Up to 200 strip poker players will compete Saturday to see who will lose their shirts — and more — and who will scoop 10,000 pounds by retaining their clothes and modesty.

All around the nation. We're the new sensation.

A good friend recently reminded me of a minor source of embarrassment for me. He posted a clip to my MySpace profile from a kids' show from the '80s (and, I was surprised to learn, '90s) called Kids Incorporated.

It's a rendition of "Over and Over" by Madonna. As it's her birthday, I thought appropriate to re-post it here:



As I recall, every episode of that show was book-ended with musical numbers. How much you want to bet that "Over and Over" was the last scene of this particular one, and the girl singing it (Renee, I now know, following some Google research) had had some sort of crisis earlier in the show where she felt like a failure but her friends convinced her to keep trying until she succeeded? Those closing numbers were always thematically relevant and oh-so cathartic.

Some quick Googling reveals that the clip is from Season 2, episode 5: "The Big Lie," in which, according to www.kidsincorporated.us (turn down the volume before clicking!) "Renee's rumor about Riley blows up into a big lie."

Riley was the soda jerk, I am ashamed to remember, at the place where the little supa-stars performed. In fact, the place was called The Place, because the first A in "Palace" had burned out on the marquee. (Oh, no. It's all coming back to me.)

So, not exactly as I thought, but evidently poor Renee had to talk herself out of the doldrums with an obscure Madonna B-side following her brush with Sunday afternoon immorality.

I'm embarrassed to remember how many episodes of that show I watched as a kid. Every Sunday. I'd stand my friends up in order to sit in front of the tube with this silly tripe. Even then I was kind of annoyed by the awful, watered-down, cleaned-up shadows of pop songs I actually liked. But it was infectious. And the show did give us Martika, so who can complain, right?

Incidentally, that show also gave us:
• Eric Balfour (Six Feet Under)
• Stacy Ferguson (Black Eyed Peas)
• Jennifer Love Hewitt (Party of Five)
• Mario López (Saved by the Bell)
• Scott Wolf (Party of Five)

	Teenage dreamboat Ryan Lambert. The chicks on either side of him formed a girl group in the '90s called Wild Orchid. The one on the right is the hot blonde from Black Eyed Peas [Kids Inc Photo Home Page]

I had such a crush on the dark-haired white kid, Ryan. He was so cool, with his spiked hair and turned-up collar. I wanted to BE him. He was also in The Monster Squad, in which he was also heart-stoppingly cool. Remember him? I guess he's the lead singer of a San Francisco band now called elephone. They just put out an album this summer. He's not nearly as cute as he used to be.

The episodes where he sang were always my favorite. Back then I guess I thought it was envy. In retrospect, I can see it was young puppy-lust. Good lord. I was 9, 10, 11 and 12 during the years he was on that show. How did it take me so long to come out of the closet?

Flounder

Walking along the shoreline toward the parking lot at the beach yesterday, we saw a little kid and his dad fishing. They were standing on the beach like anyone else, but they had rods, hooks, and fishing line. It seemed unusual and dangerous to be fishing where other people were swimming, but what do I know?

	Flounders are weird-looking. They swim sideways, and they have evolved to have both eyes on the top side of their bodies. I wonder if it's always the same side. And who decided: right or left? Mother nature is a slow-poke, though: Their mouths are still sideways. [www.northfloridafishing.com]

As we passed by, the dad was stooping down to pick something up from the sand. It looked like a large, broad, flat, brown leaf. Some kind of fish, I figured. Sure was ugly. He carried it carefully with two hands and walked toward the water. The kid, maybe 6 years old, maybe 7, looked up at us and exclaimed, "We caught a flounder!"

Then, turning to the people walking just behind us, he added, "How unusual!"

It was this second part that caught my attention, his high-pitched voice, his stress on the second syllable: "How un-yoo-sual!" I started laughing to myself at his precociousness as I walked away.

He was beside himself with surprise, joy, pride. I heard him repeating it a few more times, probably to anyone who looked at him. A flounder! How unusual!

When I was a kid, catching any living creature was a thrill, from the smallest tadpole to the largest pike. I loved fishing as a kid — everything but breaking the worms apart with my fingers. (I usually used a knife. A clean cut seemed more humane. Certainly less messy for me.)

His dad must have said it earlier. Looking at the fish on the line, the kid asking what it was, he must have said something like. "Huh. A flounder. How unsual." And that kid, so desperate to grow up and emulate his dad, was sharing the news with us all.

All This for a Bagel?

It's amazing what you can get for a buck on the Lower East Side: a toasted bagel with butter, a banana, and an earful of conspiracy theory.

A guy ordering a few slices of American cheese from the deli nearby struck up a conversatin with me out of nowhere.

"Did you see that Al Gore movie? What's it called?" he said.

"An Inconvenient Truth," I said. "No, I haven't seen it yet."

He said he just loved it — "It's so scary, because it's all true" — and all but made me promise that I would see it at th earliest opportunity. I assured him I would. And I do plan to.

Then he asked me about another documentary, something called Loose Change, which I had not heard of. Many of my lefty friends have, I'm sure. Probably I'm just not paying enough attentinon.

"Oh yeah," he said. "It's great. It explains how 9/11 was entirely set up by the government. It'll knock your socks off! It goes through point by point and says how it was all set up."

I was incredulous. Was a New Yorker actually suggesting that 9/11 was a government setup? Aren't we past all of this five years later?

"It's very convenient," he continued, "that the only plane that didn't make it was the one that was supposed to hit the White House."

I can understand the frustration with our government. As he put it a moment later: "I tell you, I wish it had hit the White House. I'd like to bomb the White House. Take care of all of 'em at once."

Nevermind that "all of 'em" don't all work there.

I can even forgive an off-hand wish to see the neocons — gulp — eliminated. But to honestly believe that 9/11 is an elaborate construction of a government that has shown itself over the course of five and a half years to be, at best, incompetent, you'd have to be crazy or just uneducated. It's just not in the realm of possibility, from what I can see.

"Thank god for term limits," is all I could think to say.

There's a good Wikipedia entry on the movie. In its objective, just-the-facts-ma'am way, it sort of debunks the movie by default. Loose Change sounds like a piece of crap. It was made by three guys with $2,000 and laptop using other people's footage and logically misleading tactics.

I feel funny linking to a Wikipedia entry when Wikipedia is one of the sources cited by the filmmakers, a source which, as explained in the entry itself, is not entirely reliable enough to back up allegations as serious as those in Loose Change. So, how can it be reliable enough to debunk it, right? Well, it has a lot of reputable annotations. Seems good enough to me.

One of them, Screw Loose Change, is blog with a pretty comprehensive collection of debunkery.

Anyway, after revealing his dreams of decapitating the American government, the guy shifted the conversation to big business and Ken Lay. He mentioned a movie called Enron: Where did your Money Go?, or something, playing at some local cinema, as well as a few others I don't remember. He went on and on about white collar crime and the persecution of the poor and middle classes... Halliburton... bla bla bla... much of which, in the cases of the big scandals, is probably true.

The shop owner, in a futile attempt to save me, tried to wave him off. "Leave him alone. Leave the pooor guy alone!"

I certainly wasn't doing anything to save myself. Why am I so nice to strangers? I didn't want to argue with him, but I didn't want to indulge him either.

Then he veered over to The Media and of course the insidious desire to lie to the public and cover up all the Truth exposed by these messianic amateur filmmakers. He told me I should listen to WBAI, which is not controlled by corporate sponsorship, if I wanted to know the truth. Maybe it is good, but should I go by this guy's endorsement?

Meanwhile, my bagel was getting cold.

People who live in the United States — which is not the panacea of democracy it wants to be, but which is obviously better than a great many other places in the world, arguably most — are free to criticize the motivations of government and big business. That's fine. Hooray for democracy: You can wish George W. Bush dead and not get arrested.

But if you think the dark forces of government and big business are as oppressive and dangerous and ravenous as he seems to believe, if you're that freaked out about the world, how can you wake up and just go about your work like normal every day? If what he thinks is true is really true, I'd be either terrified to the point of suicide or fighting mad. I wouldn't be wasting my time in the deli telling some guy who works in the neighborhood to watch some documentaries. I'd be on the next boat out of here.

But, oh... he was so smug. He knew it all. He was so safe and above it, and we were all duped. I suppose just before Bush, Cheney, Condi, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzalez, the executives of the New York Times and Andrew Fastow merge and absorb the ghost of Ken Lay to assume their true form as an unspeakably grotesque leviathan, sent here by unseen forces to destroy the world, this guy and the rest of the Believers will be rescued by a passing fleet of space ships and whisked away to an alien civilization where milk doesn't go sour and flowers don't wilt.

Maybe I have more faith in the rest of the world outside of Washington to know better than a few guys with a couple thousand dollars and a laptop what's going on in America. But maybe I'm just naïve.

Eating. Why?

Eating is bizarre.

Earlier today I couldn't take my eyes off a guy with a Baskin Robbins sundae sitting across from me on the bus. Over and over I watched him cut his pink plastic spoon through the whipped cream into the stubborn hard-pack chocolate ice cream below, hack out a small nugget (testing the limits of the flimsy spoon) and carry it to his mouth. He'd close his lips around the spoon, pull it out and start again. Maybe the next time a tendril of strawberry would hang over the edge of the spoon, and he'd have to open wider or give it a bit more action with the tongue. As the sundae melted, the whole process got messier. But he attacked that sundae with determination and rhythm, pausing for breath and to check the street signs — rarely, because he was transfixed by the ice cream.

Here was a grown, fit man, eating a sundae. Totally ordinary. But, briefly, utterly captivating. It wasn't sexy or funny like food can sometimes be. It was just a guy eating ice cream. But it struck me how silly the whole thing was — this process of carrying food to our stomachs — junk food especially — only to have it passed through, digested and dropped back out again hours later. The whole fact of eating seemed to me in that moment to be just a weird waste of time.

Why chew? Why break it up into small pieces? Why put it in a cup or bowl? On a plate? With matching utensils and napkins? Why cook and prepare it? Why transport it great distances? I wonder why we don't simply take the raw ingredients and put them directly into our bodies. Why this activity called eating?

I guess, it's because we absolutely need to fill our minutes with sensation.

People so often invest so much attention in what they are eating. How often have I watched someone stare at a bagel with cream cheese, lift it to her wide-open mouth, clamp down, smear her cheeks with goo, chew madly while wiping her face, then stare at the bagel again? Or blow across the rim of a polystyrene cup, gazing into space as the waves of coffee lap the far edge? What are we looking at?

Maybe we're watching the steam rise. Maybe we're looking at the shapes our teeth make or the layers of colors in a sandwich. Maybe we're looking at the ice cream melt against the spoon or the saliva freeze to the stainless steel. Maybe we're watching the butter glisten in a bowl of peas or the oil dribble from a slice of pizza. Maybe we're looking at the holes in the bread or wondering about what grows from a sesame seed.

Who knows. But whatever we're doing, it seems to me to be an extremely introverted and self-indulgent practice.

Eating is a function of the body no more glamorous than sleeping, crying, sweating, farting, burping, bleeding. Truth be told, chewing is only a few steps away from shitting.

There's a scene in My So-Called Life, in which Angela says in one of her voice-over monologues, "I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It just means too much to her. I mean, if you start to think about, like, chewing, what it really is, how people just do it, like, in public."

She seems not to complete the thought, but even then I knew exactly what she meant.

And she's right: We — sensible, boring people, that is — don't have sex in public. We don't pee in public. Eating is kind of gross. It's kind of personal. What in the world are we doing with a sundae on a bus?

Summer is Dead. Long Live Summer.

This morning, in the kitchen, brewing coffee and cobbling together a meager lunch, with windows open all over the apartment and no air conditioning on, I noticed a coolness in the cross-breeze that wasn't there yesterday. There was a dry, still and cold aspect to the morning air that made my arm hair stand up and my insides go soft. I love the first time every year I notice this coolness. It didn't last long. It may be wishful thinking, but there will be more mornings like this in the weeks to come. And one day, in mid-September, I'll realize that it's here — it's really here. Autumn is knocking on the door now, and summer is too hungover to get off the couch to answer. But it won't be long before the Tylenol kicks in and summer will step out for a Big Bacon Classic and let autumn in for a while in its absence.

Go On Ahead, Baby

On a caffeine run one day last week, I was once again charmed by a stranger. It was during the heat wave, and coffee was not an option, so I headed to a bodega near my office, in search of a Coke Zero, my carbonated beverage of choice. Standing like a zombie in front of the refrigerator case, I overheard a woman buying lottery tickets say something about a younger woman who had just left the store. The two had been chatting like people do in line at a bodega.

"'Cuz it's hot outside," the girl had said.

"I know. That's why you ain't hardly wearing anything on your body," the woman said.

The girl left, and the older woman continued a previous conversation with the clerk. I didn't hear what she said, but I knew it was a reaction to how little the girl had been wearing.

"Some people just like to show their bodies," he suggested.

"Uh-huh. Well, I like to show my body too," said the woman, laughing saucily. "But you got to have some sense about it. You can't go around wearing nothing."

The clerk agreed.

"I show my body too," she continued, "but at the right time, you know what I'm saying?" She paused for effect. "Leave something to the imagination. That's what I say."

The clerk laughed a little. I imagined he didn't know what to say in response.

I was a little annoyed by her. She seemed to be trying too hard to impress her audience. She is not someone about whose body I would typically spend much time thinking. It's not a body one would expect or want to see uncovered, and I was surprised to hear her say something suggestive about it. The sentiment was old-fashioned, but the images it provoked were more than I wanted to consider at the moment.

She was sort of sausage-shaped and she wore a modest dress generously cut from an immodest print of big orange and green flowers that swayed on a white background with every move she made. She was not an invalid, but I could see she didn't have an easy time getting around. She stood as if her legs were always stiff and sore. Her swollen ankles bulged around the edges of her shoes. She was not a beauty, but she was clearly full of life. She's what I would call robust.

There was something holding up the lottery ticket machine, and it was occupying the clerk's attention. She noticed me standing there, patiently holding a bottle of soda and two dollar bills.

"Go on ahead, baby," she said warmly, and motioned to the clerk to take care of me.

I was struck by the aunt-like quality of the gesture. Baby seemed a strange word to use. It could mean everything or nothing. You could say it to a lover or you could say it to a stranger at a bodega. It underscored a generational difference. A cultural difference.

Her sauciness made more sense to me. Or rather, it was easier to imagine her in other situations. Jolly, yet formidable. A talker at a family barbecue. Good with a story. But if I were one of her grandbabies, I would not want to cross her. I left the store admiring her vitality.

The Nice Thing About 95° and 50% Humidity ...

... is that I don't have to moisturize. My skin is plenty moist all by itself. If I did use any sort of lotion, it would only work back out of my pores and run down my face in great rivers of heavy, milky sludge anyway.

I've been showering three times a day at least during this heat wave. Normally, the soap would be burning my skin to a tight, dry, scaly mess. With conditions as they are, an hour after toweling off, my face has excreted a shiny, greasy sheen of salt and sebum. I could scrape my face with a strigil, like those ancient Olympians, and use the oil to read by lamplight tonight (thereby conserving electricity, thankyouverymuch, Mr. Bloomberg).

The downside is that my legs, unable to breathe under my oppressive chinos, are breaking out in a marvelous display of angry-looking epidermal eruptions. I feel pretty.

Can't we just skip ahead to mid-September?

Minneapolis, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Ways.

Just feeling nostalgic.

• Nordeast Minneapolis
• Surdyk's
• Surdyk's Cheese Shop
• The unshaven, misanthropic Surdyk's Cheese Shop workers — Can I try a slice of ... that one?
• Nye's
• Psycho Suzy's Motor Lounge
• Room in the back yard for a vegetable garden, an herb garden, and a butterfly garden
• Fish & chips at Brit's Pub
• Aloof disdain for the Mall of America
• Guthrie Theater
• Jungle Theater
• Walker Arts Center
• The Lagoon Theater
• Bryant Lake Bowl
• Dykes Do Drag
• The Mississippi River
• Progressive politics
• City Hall
• The Skyway
• Lake Calhoun
• Watching the joggers, rollerbladers and cyclists at Lake Calhoun
• Lakewood Cemetary
• The luminescent Target Corp. tower
• Loring Park
• Minnehaha Falls
• Stone Arch Bridge
• St. Anthony Main
• Let It Be Records
• Big Brain Comics
• The Capitol
• The House of Cards parking ramp
• '80s night at The Saloon
• Doc, the best bartender I've ever seen
• Professing hatred for The Gay '90s but going there to dance in the retro bar anyway
• Minnesota Public Radio
• People who know where Lake Wobegon is
• St. Paul's Cathedral
• Caribou Coffee
• The straight kickboxer bartender at Trikkx who worked shirtless during happy hour
• Disagreeing with the snobby, joyless movie reviews in CityPages
• The stupid-looking banner of the Star Tribune
• The Minnesota State Fair
• St. Paul
• All my friends