Category: The Dating Game

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Coco takes a cruise on the Love Boat

I’ve had a personal ad on mygaydar.com for some time now, but guys there seem to conform to a less voluptuous, almost emaciated, and certainly less furry physical type than catches my eye, so I don’t check my messages there very often.  When I logged on in January, after an absence of several months, there was a message from a stunningly beautiful man saying he was visiting SF in December and wanted to meet me for tea, that he was interested in getting to know me. You know, my idea of a stunningly beautiful man—plump and hairy, with deep dark wells for eyes. Well, he was back in Arabia(!) by the time I got his note, but I responded anyway, and he wrote back to say that he was moving to San Francisco in a few weeks!

We’ve been virtually inseparable since.  That is, united by digital streams of information and longing but not proximity.  He’s smart and sweet and effusive. His behavior sometimes reminds me of the subconscious that I try to keep contained—his spills out at my feet, no mediation between desire and expression. He might not be real yet, but his intensity, thoughtfulness, and affection are realer than anything I’ve experienced in my life.

But wait, my Foreign Correspondent lives on the other side of the world, we don’t really know each other, and love is determined by such subtleties of attraction, and those subtleties are contingent on actually meeting and touching and interacting directly, right? and whatchyoutalkinbout love for, Willis?  I want to blurt out “Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove” but I restrain myself—well, okay, maybe not too restrained—but knowing that my feelings are intensified by my longing, my desire to be with someone like him, but that who he is isn’t knowable yet.

But I won’t restrain myself with you, dear reader… I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love with a won-der-ful guy!!! …I mean, “I should be singing that I think I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love with a potentially won-der-ful guy!”  Could happiness fall into my lap so effortlessly? Could he really be the one that I’ve been waiting for my entire life?  Who knows, we might not be each other’s cup of tea when we actually meet…

Who am I kidding? There’s no way that we won’t fall in love.

I try to keep things in perspective, like these feelings of love for someone who’s only a jpeg and a voice and a few words. I mean, we don’t know each other yet. But he’s different from the rest.  Did I ever think I’d say that?  Haven’t I seen all the movies where the guys they say that about end up truly not being different except that they’re psychopaths?  He isn’t different, actually—different from the rest, yes, but he’s like me.  This is what excites me so.  Somebody like me.

Here’s an excerpt from a recent note from him:

I can’t control it anymore, i can not be for anyone but you, Habibi… I love each single thing in you… Babe, i am not afraid to tell you that you have me all of me… You own my fantazies now when i am alone soon you will own the reality of my life.

Could you believe, dear reader, that I am the object of this beautiful man’s affection?  Are you as excited as I?  His lowercase i’s are just adorable. I certainly hope we like each other, I mean, after already falling in love.

Stay tuned, and fasten your seatbelts!

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Step into the “light!”

I’m starting this new photo project.  Well, I don’t know if I’d call it a project yet—let’s call it an investigation.  I’ve been photographing light reflecting off of water, focusing on the space between what’s being photographed and the camera, rather than on what is reflecting the light.  Inspired by the Stan Brakhage films that Konrad showed during my and Dean’s Smith’s exhibitions at Meridian, I feel that I want to explore the absence of subject matter, to distill the photographic process into an experience of light and film.  And me.

Although, really, I’m not very excited about these “light” pictures, not feeling very engaged yet.  Dean called a little while ago and urged me on, so I’ll continue my investigation, but I think it’s back to the body for me…  Maybe light and the body?  We’ll see, I think I have to play a bit and then a project will fall into place.  And maybe my Foreign Correspondent will get here soon and I’ll have some fresh furry inspiration.

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Just two words…

I got a message from an admirer in Arabia this morning that was so sweet—and so perplexing linguistically, I had to share it…

“In two words; you’ve got me longtime ago.”

Two words?

Have you seen Jia Zhang-Ke’s Still Life? It’s a film about two people who have become separated from their spouses, one for 2 years, the other for 16, each seeking a different kind of resolution to his/her separation. Mirroring their displacement, and as a backdrop, are the people being displaced by the Three Gorges Dam project in southern China, and the destruction of their villages. It’s such a beautifully told story, and told in a way that’s closer to reality than cinematic narrative, except that Jia does these totally wild things like has a building abruptly launch into the sky, or a UFO suddenly flies by, wild things that bring us back into cinematic space. Two words: I love him.

So my Foreign Correspondent: He’s of Greek, Italian and Palestinian descent, the gene pool of my fantasies. I’m all set to dive right in, but we’re separated by a lot of earth and a lot of fish, not to mention barriers of language, communication, intimacy and just about all sensory input and expression. And yet, a virtual romance blossoms.

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Post Birthday Post

Sheesh, I just looked at this blog and realized I have written hardly anything this year. What’s the deal? Well, the turns that life has taken this year resemble a bit too closely the turns taken last year, and the year before. And probably the year before; trips to the south, the midwest, dates with all the wrong but-incredibly-sexy guys, Big Chrissy, Dean, the theater, opera, movies, expensive restaurants, visiting europeans, art… I’m clinging to the tail end of my mid-life crisis, the point where resignation and contentment are supposed to align and the new era begins. I see myself teetering, ready to roll into new experience, but held back by the comfort of the familiar and the dogged determination to not let go, not just yet. I might be consoled by the cyclical nature of my unfulfilled desires and experiences, but writing about them again and again is just going to be boring for you, gentle readers.

Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. The weekend was pretty fabulous, with many dinners, a carrot cake (like last year), a chocolate raspberry mousse cake, loved ones, barbequed oysters, the Sonoma Coast, movies, the Legion of Honor… Big Chrissy surprised me by purchasing most of the books on cooking that I don’t yet have that were mentioned in the recent article in The Art of Eating titled “Throw the Rest Out.” Tonight Bob’s taking me to the Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant to continue the birthday season. Imagine Mandarin Chinese food, but with lamb and middle eastern spices.

I want there to be more films by Fatih Akin. They’re about how life is, not how we want it to be.

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When Mr. Right Goes Wrong

So we had dinner at this kind of expensive restaurant on 18th Street, Eureka. Forebodingly, the food consisted of interesting ingredients that made no sense being together on the same plate. My gnocchi was pan fried. Why would they do that to gnocchi? The chocolate cake for dessert was slathered with more syrupy sauce than cake. But I adored my dinner companion, Mr. Right, and felt that we were really connecting. He leaned right across the table at one point and planted one right on my lips. I hadn’t realized when he drew me near that he wanted to kiss me, so thinking he wanted to whisper something, I offered my ear, which he had to kind of push out of the way to eventually get to my lips. I turned really red and the people at the opposite table smiled, except the guy who had been cruising him throughout our appetizers, annoyingly.

Back at the Cocoplex, my attention alternated between his little bald spot and his furry stubby fingers, with frequent exploratory forays into other regions. I flipped him over and over, my furry pancake. Perhaps you remember, dear reader, that shaving below the neck is forbidden in my erotic world? It was like fellating a cactus, but I put on a performance that the Academy surely would have awarded their top prize.

At midnight I pushed him out, reminding him that he had to get up and go to work the next day. Off he went. And away he went. In our brief online post-coital exchange, I sensed that he didn’t share my enthusiasm for supplemental complications. He hasn’t responded to any of my messages since, or even been online. Suprised, and yes, okay, completely devastated, I sent him a chirpy message saying that I imagined that we were looking for and ready for different things, that I was looking for someone who was on the same page. I admitted to being a serial dater. You’d think that there would be a lot of chubby hairy bald guys out there who’d be excited about an admirer dedicated to their complete physical and emotional stimulation, wouldn’t you? I evidently wasn’t Mr. Right’s cup of tea–Nestea, instant.

My disappointment was profound. Not so much in him specifically, I’m aware of that, but in the seemingly vast emptiness that San Francisco has offered lately for intellectual and emotional exchange. After staying in bed most of the day, calling Bob and Chrissy in the middle of the night, e-mailing Dean and Emily and Peter, not sleeping much, I decided that I needed to see some art to get my mind off of love gone wrong. I made Chrissy take me to Jessica Silverman’s gallery on Sutter Street. I fell in love with the gallery, with the work, and with Jessica. I want to show there. She’ll be my rebound!

Later I went to Zuni with Emily. I sat downstairs for a half hour waiting for her, while she sat upstairs for a half hour waiting for me. When we finally found each other, I was ready to fall apart, but Emily shook me back into the present with her charm, fabulous outfit, and juicy gossip. A succulently braised chicken leg seduced me further away from the lingering memory of Mr. Right’s stubbled appendage, my sanded lips finally caressed by something truly succulent.

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Two Brief Encounters

Bless me Blog, it’s been months since my last entry.  No mortal sins, but a few juicy venial ones.  Countless lost episodes of the Dating Game.  Two contestants in particular will be the focus of my brief entry today.

In September I had a goodbye lunch with someone I had met several weeks prior for tea.  He’s now off to grad school in New York.  We had hit if off swimmingly over the tea, but then time, a traumatic hypopigmentation, and his moving to the east coast kind of got in the way of pursuing anything more substantial than speculating over our tea leaves.  He has the smoldering look of a Jane Austen hero.  My Darcy.  But with a little belly.  At lunch I ended up spilling my former loves onto the table.  I told him of my blurted “I love yous” and readiness for instant intimacy.  He looked at me as if looking into Elizabeth Bennet’s eyes and said sweetly, sincerely, “I love you.”

Last night I had dinner with a fellow–let’s call him Mr. Right.  He’s tall, 6’1″ and big, 240 pounds, with thick hairy paws, a little nose, a black beard speckled with tiny slivers of gray, glasses–all crowned by a little bald spot.  I dove right into his openness and swam around like a kid at summer camp.  Have I at last won First Prize at the Fair?  He’s engaged with art and ideas and doesn’t scrape me with his teeth.  I don’t know what could or might happen, but Cupid has, if not pierced, at least thumped this puppy’s heart, and I’m pretty excited about the possibilities of further entanglements.

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Longing and More Longing in San Francisco

My whirlwind romance with Mr. Washington is over. Do you know those guys who tell you they love you after the first kiss? Who can’t seem to separate sex and love? Well, that’s me, only I have to be careful sometimes not to say it before the first kiss. It’s not that I can’t separate the two, they’re the same thing. Oh, so, yes, I can’t separate the two. Sex is never about anything but love, however briefly or squalidly expressed. I sent this carefully crafted note to Mr. Washington, outlining my desire and his appeal, how even though internet couplings are defined by instant messages and flashed body parts, I yearned for a fuller engagement that didn’t deny access to the rest of experience.  He didn’t answer. The police would probably warn you not to engage with me. So here I am again, adrift out in cyberspace waiting for an analog lover to float by.

Welcome to Chris’ Flip Flop Courtship. Some alien race is observing my mating ritual even now and wondering how this could possibly lead to the successful reproduction of my species. They’re probably considering intervention.

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The Dating Game: Virtual Sensory Reality

I’ve been seeing this guy. I mean that literally. No senses, other than the visual, have been mutually stimulated in our brief courtship. We met via an online video-chat program, and have spent all of our intimate time together there, in an 800 x 600 pixel box. He lives in Washington, and is like all of my obsessions: hairy, receding hairline, chubby… and with a face that is the single grandest thing that has ever appeared on my computer monitor. I just sent him an instant message. I thanked him for our date this morning and went into detail about desire and 15th century portraits of saints and projecting emotions and licking his butt and not the video screen, how deprived my senses were… I wonder if he’ll call the police?

While composing my instant-opus, TheMonkeyBear flashed by and enlightened me about a new kind of bacterial sharing. Apparently, some guys who don’t wear deodorant, when bumping into like-pitted fellows–he didn’t tell me how they recognize each other, but I bet it doesn’t have to do with sight–rub their underarms together, go along their merry way, and within a few hours, voila!, a new scent borne of the bacterial union.

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Love in the Time of Diarrhea

Last week BC and I watched Pascale Ferran’s brilliant Lady Chatterley, based on “John Thomas and Lady Jane,” D.H. Lawrence’s second version of his Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I am still moist. It’s a beautiful beautiful film. It doesn’t represent sexuality as something detached from the rest of human experience, but how we’re the same before, during and after love. The lovers separate at the end of the film, agreeing on an open future that may or may not include them being together in it, but they’ve evolved so fully because of their love, accessed such intimate truths, there’s no sadness or regret, just excitement about what’s ahead. Plus Parkin is hot as all get out.

The birds have converged on Casa Coco. There are so many robins in my backyard munching down on the cotoneaster berries and frolicking in the ashtrays-cum-birdbaths I feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s Cinderella. Soon they’ll patch together a dress for me and take me away to the ball in an Italian Prune Plum carriage. They’ve eaten all the berries from the top of one tree over the past few months, and with plenty more, they’re going to be here for a while.

I woke up early Valentine’s Day morning to a slightly stronger version of a familiar scent that registered after a moment as not my own. Tossing back the sheets I was surprised to find a fairly large and colorful deposit from my bed-guest, which formed a trail from the bed down the hall to the bathroom, where an auditory experience competed with the olfactory and visual cacophony forming my morning greeting. Valentine’s Day morning was spent scrubbing my Tibetan hall runner and washing sheets. The SuperBears and I made crabcakes for dinner, then BC and I snuggled up to The Swimmer with Burt Lancaster. My sparkling hall runner, Burt’s basket and Marvin Hamlisch’s cheesy score made the perfect Valentine.

I gave up the Gilbert & George opening last night to see my friend Kevin in a play about an imagined meeting between Hitler and Walt Disney. Kevin made a very commanding and hot little Hitler. The rest of the cast did a great job, too, and while BC, Reese and I thought that the writer could develop his ideas, dialogue and staging a bit, we thought that the ideas were intriguing. I would have loved to have seen Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl’s affair developed, only to be completely ignored by the other characters, for instance–their ignorance mirroring the German people’s turning away from what was happening in front of them. In other words, too much of the ideas were spelled out in the dialogue–explained really. Conveying the ideas within the action and interaction among the characters would have made for a more lyrical and thought-provoking play. The play ends with Valter and Adolf playing on the floor with models of their kingdoms, just two boys with big ideas.

I’m gallery hopping with Emily today. The bears are in town, so I’m seeking aesthetic-, instead of sensual-healing this lovely day.

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51 is the new 44

While waiting for my slides to get duped and for my Shelley Winters/Debbie Reynolds midnight double-feature horror dvd to arrive, I perused the Craigslist personals today, to follow the abject sex lives of my former suitors. I think I mentioned them before–or the perennially-on-Craigslist one of them–but I’m going to mention them again, because I’m bugged. First off, I’m bugged that I saw even one smidgen of an attractive quality in either. One is now seven! years younger since we went out, the other… well, I can’t really mention his particular metamorphosis, except to wonder how he would have faked such a thing with me had we ever actually met. The mysteriously-7-years-younger guy might be trying to appeal to the type of guys who like the not-too-much-older-guys-who-look-significantly-older-than-they-say-they-are? While I may photograph myself from particularly flattering angles, and with lighting that accentuates this or that, I endeavor to portray myself in a realistic light. That is, if we meet, you’re going to find out that those gray whiskers in my picture are also on my face, so why Photoshop them out?

I voted for Hilary today. I want a smart person in the White House again, and Hilary’s married to one.

I pruned my plum tree this morning. It’s still on its last legs–its last trunk, actually–but it has at least a few more years in it. I lost a few key limbs in wind storms over the years, limbs that were unfortunately ripped from the central trunk just below their collars, so they never healed correctly, and now there’s rot in the central trunk. I think I’m going to wait, though, until it just topples over. Or not. Or until I can decide on what I want to plant in its place. I’d love a fruiting cherry, but I’m not sure if there’s one that would do well in San Francisco or with my particular micro-climate.

Today was an absolutely beautiful day in San Francisco, cold and crisp and sunny. The first flowering plum blossom opened in my side garden, and the daphnes have begun to release their perfume. All is right.