The Law of Anti-Attraction

There is a cardinal rule that I have learned about dating: if you have too many dates scheduled for one night—you will go home alone.  It seems contrary to logic—like if you buy more lottery tickets, you have a greater chance of winning—but in the realm of dating, the more people you try to hook up with in one night, the lower your chances are of getting laid.

I often fall victim to this law of anti-attraction.

Tonight was one of those nights.

My favorite band in the world was playing at the Bottom of the Hill tonight.  The Bass Player was my quasi-boyfriend for awhile—meaning that we went on tour together and made out in the back of venues and bought each other souvenirs at gas stations in Kansas—so I was super excited to see him. 

I had also invited Girl of my Dreams, and Kinky Jewish Boy (who I had had a ridiculously awesome fuckfest with just a few nights ago. I’m still bearing the bruises from our time together).  The Photographer—who has begun to make his affections for me more and more obvious—would also be attending. In short, I had far too much on my plate

When I got off work and took a taxi from the wretched Marina to the beloved Valencia street, I arrived at Cha Ya (vegetarian amazing sushi) to have a meal with the Photographer. I drank too much sake and started giggling uncontrollably, which I’m sure was charming at first, but probably not for long.

Upon arrival at the venue, I searched the high and low for The Bass Player.  We eventually saw each other across the sea of crowded hipsters. He had grown a 70’s rocker mustache since the last time I saw him, but still our faces lit up uncontrollably as we embraced like brothers.  

He took my hand and let me up to the dressing room where we exchanged stories of the road. We compared the awesome belt buckles we had both acquired since the last visit (mine was far superior, having two roosters on it with the words “Cock fighting” emblazoned across the front).

And then, things got a little weird…

I suddenly felt like I couldn’t stop looking at my shoes and twiddling my thumbs.  I've never been to summer camp, but I have a feeling that if I had been to summer camp and had a boyfriend and then seen him the following summer…I might feel just like I was feeling in that moment.

Girl of My Dreams showed up.  She was tired and not drinking, which didn’t really mesh well with my overly enthusiastic “I love everybody!” mood fueled by sake and IPA.  All I wanted to do was kiss the corners of her mouth and dance all night.

I did a lot of just that.

Kinky Jewish Boy flaked, thank god.

Eventually Girl of My Dreams left for the night, and I was in the middle of the venue with The Bass Player.  We were standing in a sea of yet to be loaded out band equipment. I kissed him on the cheek and said…

I love you.

Fuck.

This is why one shouldn’t drink too much on nights with more than one date.

He was sweet and gave me lots of hugs with promises to keep in touch better, but as I sat in the Photographer’s car as he drove me home that night, my forehead pressed against the freezing glass window…I just felt really stupid.

I’m on my way to go see The Bass Player’s band again tonight in Santa Cruz.  I also might take some MDMA…why don’t I ever learn?

Hot Tubs, Pony Play, and Blood Sports, oh my!

I cannot decide if I am terribly forgetful or terribly nostalgic. However, one might say that in order to be terribly nostalgic, one must be terribly forgetful.

However, I find myself feeling less wistful these days and I long for my past less and less, and only experience nostalgia for the most immediate moment as it evaporates before me.

In other words…right now I’m very happy.

The other night during the mermaid photo shoot, the Photographer paused and suddenly said “Are you familiar with ‘pony play?” I immediately tensed; suddenly aware that I was half girl half fish and that perhaps I had naively walked into some sort of super kinky aqua-bestiality fantasy of his. 

“Uh. Yes.” I answered cautiously, wondering if the next prop he would bring out for me to pose with would be a bridle and a saddle. I shuddered to think.

Much to my relief, it turned out that the Photographer was set to shoot a fetish model later that week, and she would be doing some “pony slut” looks.  She apparently also has a kinky unicorn costume she wears on occasion, which I found exciting.

So tonight the Photographer asked me if I cared to act as his assistant for the night. Which sounded both fun and hot. How could I say no to being a fly on the wall during a fetish-modeling shoot? I couldn’t.  So I didn’t.

And there I was a few hours later, lacing a buxom Asian woman with magenta hair into a frilly hot pink corset.

She wasn’t the best model.  She got embarrassed easily and despite her wealth of exciting costumes and props, she seemed highly uncomfortable in her own skin.  While she was a lovely girl, I had to fight the urge on several occasions to push her out of the way, snatch her 6 inch patent leather pumps off her toes and show her how it’s done.

But instead I was civil and made friends.  Turns out we had a lot in common: When I mentioned some lesbians that I knew who recently did a photo shoot involving Spiderman underwear and smearing each other in vials of their own blood, we found out that SHE TOO knew of some lesbians who were into blood play…but it turns out they weren’t the same lesbians. Apparently in San Francisco there are a bunch of those.

 She was not your typical fetish model with her hippie tattoos, and unshaved body hair.  She had some how fit all of her props and costumes, wigs and all into 2 saddlebags for her bicycle. I could not get over how “East Bay” that was.  

After the shoot, The Photographer asked me if I would like to join him for a glass of wine and hot tubbing at his friend’s house.  It was early, and I felt that I couldn’t say no to hot tubbing a second time. 

We arrived at a house tucked away in one of those lush green sections of Oakland that are full of blossoms and wonder. 

The Photographer’s friend was surprisingly good looking with strong features.

I instantly wanted to fuck him.

Turns out he was an opera singer, about to star in a production of La Boheme. He offered me a glass of wine that he had bottled himself on his first date with some girl.

“Wow” I said. Suddenly feeling like a teenager, “I’ve never been on a first date where I bottled my own Pinot Noir.”

“Well,” said the Opera Singer, “Clearly you’ve been dating the wrong people.”

Much to my chagrin, The Opera Singer did not join us in the hot tub.  It was just the photographer and me in a magical little garden bathed in moonlight….awkwardly sitting a safe distance away from each other. Naked.

I find that despite their health benefits, hot tubs are usually more about being awkward and naked with people you don’t know that well than about true relaxation.

All the same, I planned to enjoy myself. I loved the way when I let myself float in the water, it suddenly looked like had perfectly perky porn star breasts.  I’m sure The Photographer felt the same way, since at some point he felt that it was appropriate to come closer.  Yikes! I instantly transformed from a mermaid to a hermit crab and curled my legs up against my chest, trying to remain casual and continue our conversation.

“Your friend, The Opera Singer,” I probed, “Does he have a girlfriend?”

“Several” replied The Photographer.

Hm. I thought. Well, there are worse answers.

I made it back to the BART station and onto a train just after midnight before I turned into a pumpkin.

Back in my San Francisco apartment, I ate dinner at 1 am, standing alone in my kitchen. As I shoved seaweed and quinoa into my mouth…I suddenly felt terribly single.

Fuck. I thought.

So much for not being nostalgic these days.

Manic Monday Nights.

Disclaimer: It’s almost five in the morning now, I’m not sure if I can even write coherently.  Why does 5am arrive so quickly these days?

  Tonight was full of heartache and nostalgia.  After a long and boring day of selling stupid people things they don’t need on Union Street, I somehow made my way home with just enough time to check my email for pictures from my photo shoot the night before and to have an overly intense Gchat conversation with Girl of my Dreams about how she doesn’t think she can be intimate with me because of her past sexual trauma.

Fuck.

Now, I could go into a big fucking sob story about being sick of dating people who are unfuckable, but that would be insensitive, and I think there’s already a wealth of bad slam poetry written on that subject.  Instead, I cried a little (probably more to do with not having eaten in six hours than from heartache) and accepted these terms.  I informed her that as much as I respected and admired her choice to do the right thing for herself, I could not for MY own well being, be pursuing a relationship with someone who I was not having sex with. That’s just how I roll. Does this make me an asshole? In this amorphous world of polymorphous love affairs… I don’t really even know anymore.

After a good cry and a good energetic goodbye via gchat to the supposed “girl of my dreams”, I put on a pencil skirt they shade of a yellow school bus and made my way down the street to grab a burrito before heading out for the night.

I was on my way to see my high school friend, who I had not seen for 5+ years.  She was in a rockstar band these days, playing piano. She had recently married the super epic and hopelessly dorky drummer. They played at Kimo’s on Polk Street to a small but enthusiastic crowd, especially for a Monday night. I hungrily drank dirty martinis, drooling over the way her back would arch and dance while she played the piano, while I fielded texts from the photographer from the night before. “Come to the Make Out Room” he pleaded via text.

“I can’t” I replied. “I’m overwhelmed by nostalgia.”

He was persistent however, and promised that he was hanging out with a sea of single cute lesbians….I won’t say I wasn’t tempted, but I managed to stay put and committed to where I was.  No small task for me, since I seem to have social ADD.

After the show was over, the gear loaded out, and the merch purchased, we made our way to a bar down the street. It still had it’s Christmas tree up, and had paper Mache icecicles hanging from the ceiling. I ordered a drink that was so girly and sweet I dubbed it “The Walking Vagina” (recipe: peach flavored Absolut Vodka, sprite, a splash of OJ, and a cherry. Fuck yeah.)

I quickly developed a crush on the bass player, as I am wont to do. He could match me tit for tat in Beatles trivia and had cute glasses and an appropriately hairy chest. We exchanged hugs that lasted too long, but not phone numbers, which was dumb.

I was driven home by my budding Gay BFF.  He is the BFF of my most recent ex-girlfriend, so our relationship is complex. But by the end of the night we were cuddled in my bed weeping to each other.

“Who knew?” he said.  “I never would have guessed back in high school that someday you and I would be this close, and this gay.”

“I did.” I replied.

All in all, this is just the way I like to spend my Monday nights. 

 

Modern Love

“You’re quite the modern girl” he said as I arched my bare back a little more to more fully accentuate the curvature of the mermaid tail I was wearing. 

Click.

He snapped a few more photographs.

Here I was in a lush East Bay Apartment, posing half naked for a man more than twice my age.  The terrible thing was, this wasn’t the first time I’d been in this situation—but that’s another story and another body of water.

Since moving to San Francisco, I HAVE become quite the modern girl.  As I ran my finger along the lip of my glass of red wine it made that ringing sound that sound like whales crying and I told him about my date the night before:

She had riot girl red Shirley Temple curls. On our first date she had worn blue plastic squid earrings and an electric blue prom dress. 

She is potentially the girl of my dreams.

But tonight (date#5) she was more subdued as we were on our way to Queer Contra Dancing in Oakland.  It was far too wholesome to be abided for more than an hour, but she and I enjoyed being spun around by giant gay men in tie dye skirts until we felt like we would explode and then escaping to the parking lot to indulge in less wholesome activities.

Later in the night, back on the other side of the Bay, she got a text message from her boyfriend, who was on a date with his other girlfriend and his girlfriend’s other boyfriend.

WHOA.

Rewind. Let’s just do a little chart real quick

Me-àGirl of my DreamsàGirl of my Dreams’ boyfriend who looked like Mr. Clean-àMr. Clean’s girlfriend who had Aeon Flux hairàAeon Flux’s boyfriend who was wearing a skirt.

All one happy family having drinks at a the Dirty Thieves in the Mission.  Awkward does not even begin to describe my feelings.  

It did not help that I was wearing a ridiculous outfit of teal gingham and red crinoline, as I am wont to do, and everyone else seemed to have borrowed all their clothing from the cast of the Matrix. They looked at me like I had food spilled all over myself or something.  Like they were embarrassed for me.  When Aeon Flux asked me what Girl of my Dreams and I had just done for our date, I did my best to explain the wholesome summer camp vibe of Queer Contra dancing.  She stared at me with a deadpan glare and said,

“Weird.”

I drank my IPA as fast as possible and Girl of my Dreams and I made our way to meet my friends at the Lexington.

“I think he liked you. “ she assured me.

I told you she was the girl of my dreams.

Somehow the overly wholesome appetizer of Queer Contra Dancing made the harsh brooding hipster dyke scene of the Lexington feel less intimidating than usual.  We smoked cigarettes outside for a while with some friends of mine, and met some overly adorable girls from Australia…one of which started making out with Girl of My Dreams almost immediately.

My cigarette smoking friends pointed and gawked, expecting me to beat somebody up, since the last time something like this happened (Q Bar during Castro Street Fair,) police had been involved.  I won’t lie and say my stomach didn’t do a little drop, and I didn’t start to sweat a little bit when I saw them.  But when Girl of my Dreams was finished with the potentially underage Australian Sheila, she bought me a gin and tonic, grabbed my ass and kissed me in that way that said “Drink fast, I’ve got a white harness and a giant black silicone cock in my bag and I can’t wait to get you alone.”

So yes, I told my photographer, as I readjusted the ukulele chastely draped across my breasts, I’ve become quite modern.

He tried to hide his intrigue with more clicks of the camera.

When we were finished and I had become a two-legged creature again, he casually invited me to join him in the hot tub before I made my journey back across the bridge. I politely declined.

 For, despite my modern sensibilities, I am still a lady.