Mirando
by stargayzer3000
M and I were on a tear walking from the showing to the train. I’ve seen so much art this week, most of it really fucking good. That day alone I’d been to a museum for a few hours, then saw the one show and was on my way to the other. I told M I was having “advanced perceptual training” day. I’m lucky to get to see so much right now. It’s not always the case, I miss a lot cuz of traveling, rehearsing, blah blah blah poor me. I told my PT, and then M, that for a while I’ve been fantasizing about taking a year off from seeing dance so that I could just go see other kinds of shows like music (though I hate drunk people and I get bored standing around), art openings, classical shit. But then I forget how much I like seeing dance shows and anyway, these “clever” ideas I get about not doing X for Y amount of time… I dunno they just seem like excuses, a conceptual platform to make me feel smarter. If I wanna see a music show I can just go nobody’s stopping me. I don’t need to make some big announcement about it.
M and I can really fucking WALK and TALK. It’s alarming. It’s Olympic-level ping pong, which is just one of the many reasons I love her. I had the wherewithal to suggest walking down one of the quieter streets. I get these eruptions now – Turn now and find serenity! Find trees! I guess it happens when you get older, or so everyone says. Anyway it’s funny that I wanted a chiller detour given that we were being such manic freaks, chatting away as if we were earning miles for how fast we could speak. Suddenly there he was, walking towards us, wearing a t-shirt, khakis, a backpack. He’s so regular looking and so cute at the same time. As I realized who it was it was like I was fitting some outsized image into the body of him. He’s just a person walking down a street duh. Was he singing a little bit to himself? No that’s not true, I just have this idea he’s singing to himself all the time. He looked like he’s been hitting a keg. Or maybe the hotter weather doesn’t agree with him. It kind of just made me want to hug him and lick his neck. He totally cruised me! I swear. We locked eyes for a bit but when I looked back he didn’t turn. I think I was giving off something special that day, maybe it was my boots. They make me feel confident and grown-up. I’d gotten cruised that morning for the first time ever by the barista at the café I go to and I was so thrown cuz usually he plays it so cool and aloof. It’s exciting to get cruised. It’s so ancient, a lost art. I found myself wondering if J is filming the next season of that show anytime soon or if he did already and do they put pressure on him to be a certain weight or whatever. When I looked back I got caught up looking at his hips – I feel like there’s so much story in a guys’ hips: discomfort, hope, frustration, ease. If any of you know him tell him I’m available. That face.
But then the kicker was later that night I saw the other one! The other out gay one I mean and yes I wrote kicker. I think I heard that most of the other ones are straight. Gay for pay. I was with J (a different J obviously) and he was like let’s go to the club even though I really just wanted to go home but she’s visiting from outta town so we went to get coffee at fucking midnight and well if I’m gonna do something I’m gonna do it all the way so I had a double espresso and we were singing Kate Bush and Stevie Nicks songs in the rain and this cute couple we had run into had to endure our caffeinated lunacy as we harmonized onto the train and we made it over into the Kingdom of the Hipeoisie and right before we arrived to the club J and I turned around to realize that we’d lost the couple and that was when I saw him arriving with some young friends, wearing a black t-shirt oh it had a word on it what was it fuck I can’t remember and he had on some very regular pants almost like cargo pants but not cargo pants but the same idea without the big pockets and that signature moustache and I thought about how J says that in Berlin people dress way down to go clubbing, which made me imagine being at home trying on successively less impressive t-shirts. With M, different than with J (obviously now I’m talking about another M but now also the previous J) there really was a direct one to one correspondence between who I saw him as on the show and who he was in person. Aura, character, everything. It was unnerving actually, the congruency. Inside he met up with a taller, swarthy guy who he knew and soon they were on the dance floor all up in it and I thought, good for him. I’ll admit that I grazed his ass with my forearm on purpose as I passed him, which was inappropriate and I felt weird about it then and I still do. That club was so silly. Like a club wearing the costume of a club.
People really talk about that show on the internets. I feel sorta whatever about it. I mean, I watch it, I like it. I feel only slightly guilty about it. It’s pretty as hell and I like the music, especially when it bleeds into the end of the episode and the sexy font of the credits comes up. It’s utterly inconceivable to me that, set in THAT city, these guys never cross paths with dykes or transpeople. I mean they say that city has changed a lot but please. It’s laughably myopic. When we saw M, J said slowly the politics of that show are. so. problematic. I mean of course. Maybe it’s some basic mistrust in me that says I should never expect what I see on TV to be realistic. Probably from a lifetime of not seeing “myself” on it, as if I even know what that means, as if I’m one thing anyway. Nevertheless it’s terrible that you get used to it, all these shows where POC, women, transfolk are peppered in like decorative cushions on the enormous sofa of white gay guys’ dramas. But I know that the show’s a vessel. It serves a basic biochemical function for me when I’m sitting in my kitchen at night drinking tea and pining for a bf or needing a good cry. I get seduced like so many others, suckered into believing in the coherence of cause and effect, even though I know otherwise. That’s why I love what I do, not telling stories. Well I’m certainly not telling one. I could never live up to a single story. They’re all incomplete. People want too much from them, put so much pressure on them. I do much better with confusion and fragmented myths where you get what you want or don’t or fill in the blanks.
This was very important!