Avoiding the Bars

OK…here’s how this rant started at 3PM:

Good weekend. The weather’s nice, I got laid, the roommate got laid, the boys are semi-naked and the tearooms are hopping in Central park (oops…wrong city), a friend in Georgia is emailing me some decent grits, the Tories lost control of Parliament, I saw a good movie with friends, and “Married With Children” finally ends tonight after an interminably long run on Fox. What more could I ask?

OK…things might be better if said roommate would get off the phone so I could go eat, but this is a minor thing…

By the time I got home from “happy hour” Sunday evening, this is how my mood had changed:

If San Francisco is such a fucking fabulous queer “mecca”, and is the “greatest place in the world to be gay”, why is it that so many of us feel such a need to perpetually anesthetize ourselves in order to enjoy it? Or would that be “to tolerate it”?

Kinda makes you wonder why I bother going out, doesn’t it? I think last night just presented me with one “drunken idiot” too many (with two of them being idiotic drunken ex-“boyfriends”, for lack of a better term). A few too many glassy eyes. Way too much reefer aroma. I’m even learning to ignore the tweakers. Again I ask, if it’s so wonderful, why does everyone have to get trashed and act like such complete slugs to deal with it?

And it’s not just the bars I’m talking about. Sometimes it seems like half the city is damn near catatonic for the bulk of the day. Everyone’s stoned here. Does this not suggest some slight problems with the reality of the city, causing people to try and esacpe it?

All this — combined with my current homophobic state of mind — has convinced me it’s time to take a little break from the neighborhood watering holes. And maybe from San Francisco. And DEFINITELY from the little ordered and segregated and self-destructive world of SF queerdom.

To clarify, I’m not speaking from an “I don’t drink” soapbox. In fact, the scariest thing about the whole evening was how much I actually DID drink as a reaction. OK, maybe even scarier was the desire I felt to throw and/or break things. This sensation, alas, subsided before I could drag myself to the Castro, where it might have been more productive.

Lest this start sounding like an “origins of punk”piece from 1976 or a Queer nation pamphlet from 1990 or an AA brochure, I’ll move on now…

As for Friday night’s sexcapades, all I’ll say is that when this boy (who looked a little too much like a club kid for comfort on first glance) put in the AC/DC CD first thing, I knew everything was gonna be OK.

And as to the Sunday night fiasco, don’t look for me to be drinking on Folsom Street for a while. Time to find a new hobby.