Friday, November 04, 2005

Heroin Chic

So I find myself on Wednesday night with Ryan having dinner on Clinton Street in NYC, where just a few years ago the most popular entrée was heroin with a side of dirty needles. We dined at the Clinton Street Baking Company, which was cute, but what we ultimately dubbed as “gustatorily challenged” after using my Treo 650 to look up the word for one's sense of taste. There was an insightful review from The New Yorker hanging just above our table that described the typical crowd as “self-consciously scruffy-faced twenty-somethings that can’t wait to tell their fabulous Connecticut mothers about their sophisticated new life in NYC.” Ryan and I got a chuckle that every single twenty-something in the restaurant was a dead ringer for the author’s description.

The best part of the evening, naturally, was spending time with Ryan. As always, our conversations were all over the place, but incredibly engaging and frequently disturbing. Here are some of the topics:

--Our jobs
--Cool places to do post-doctoral study
--Boys

--Why men from France suck
--The 6 phases of a pandemic (according to the WHO)
--Fist fighting as a tool in gay men’s group therapy
--How the Lower East Side is really an up-and-comer as far as neighborhoods go
--Why Ryan insists on hurting me by not reading my blog
--The difference between a pandemic and an epidemic
--Missing the Canal Street subway stop and winding up in Brooklyn
--Boys

--Where I’d live if I moved to NYC (we decided Hell’s Kitchen or Upper West Side)
--How long to expect ruminating thoughts to linger after a breakup
--How to meet cool, gay friends in NYC without sleeping with them first
--Whether or not there IS another way to meet cool, gay friends
--Symptoms and duration of anhedonia
--The definition of the word bucolic
--The difference between crystal meth and adderall
--Whether or not we could get America to start using the word “bucolisciousness”

After eating, we headed back to his apartment to walk his seven (or was it seven hundred?) flights of stairs. After we purged our dinner, we headed to a few local hangouts. It was a gorgeous evening; nice and cool with a brisk wind. This helped counter the 243 miles we walked trying to find a gay bar with more than three people in it. Ultimately we landed at Boy's Room where Ryan’s early evening foreshadowing hinted at underwear-only dress codes, circle-jerks in the bathroom and contests where volunteer scrotums were photographed and judged by patrons. Thankfully, we witnessed none of this. In fact, I was surprised that Ryan was even able to tell me stories of such debauchery without cracking up. Oh wait. He did. And so did I. All night long…


Fun times, fun times.

3 Comments:

At 12:34 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

My left hip bone keeps popping in and out of place. Is that weird?

 
At 12:35 PM, Blogger Dave said...

Only if you're under 35.

 
At 9:27 PM, Blogger Dave said...

HAHA--no, that was from Ryan, the guy I was talking about in the post. It was just one other bizarre thing we discussed.

 

Post a Comment

<< Home