I haven’t posted a plain old link in a while, but here’s one: Smartertimes.com, a one-man daily critique of the New York Times. “Smartertimes.com is dedicated to the proposition that New York’s dominant daily has grown complacent, slow and inaccurate. Even an ordinary semi-intelligent guy in Brooklyn who reads the newspaper carefully early each morning can regularly notice errors of fact and of logic.” And check out the letters.

This inspires me to write about my own little pet peeve regarding the Times, but I’ll save that for another post.

Sun and the City

Saturday’s trip to the beach got me enthusiastic about the sun again, so yesterday I decided to go to Central Park and lie out on a towel for the afternoon. First I went to the Strand — this huge secondhand bookstore — in search of Terrence McNally’s play set on Fire Island, Lips Together, Teeth Apart. And wouldn’t you know it? They had a copy of only one McNally play, and it was exactly the one I was looking for. Bought it for six bucks. Then I bought a container of fruit and sat in Union Square and ate it, staring the whole time at some guy’s shirtless muscular back. After that I took the subway up to the park and lay out on an area of grass behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sunning myself, looking at all the runners running and bladers blading, listening to snippets of Gen-X/thirtysomething midtown yuppie conversation coming from the blankets around me. When I was tired of lying in the sun, I walked through the park, from the East Side to the West Side and over to the Barnes & Noble in Lincoln Square. Beautiful weather, a healthy lunch, a relaxing afternoon, sights and sounds and people everywhere. It was a great day to be out and about in Manhattan.

Later in the evening I settled down for a postprandial nap, and I’d just begun to doze when the phone rang. It was Tall Red-Haired Guy, inviting me over to his place (a 10-minute walk away) to watch “Sex and the City” and “Six Feet Under” on HBO. It had been a year since I’d seen the former, and I’d never seen the latter. Thumbs up to them both. And you know, “Sex and the City” just seems like such a summer show — lighthearted, fun, sexy — just as “The Sopranos” seems like such a winter show — heavy, kind of dark, a little depressing sometimes. Or maybe after a couple of years I’ve just become conditioned that way.

After watching TV, well — I guess you could say that Tall Red-Haired Guy and I had a little “sex and the city” of our own.

Like you couldn’t see that one coming.

What a body, what a body, what a body. But really, the nice thing about him is that we can actually have a conversation afterwards. And he has these cute intellectual tortoise-shell glasses. We talked politics. He even offered me food, but it was almost midnight and I wasn’t hungry. Still, we sat around talking for a little while, and then I headed home.

Not a bad way to end an eventful weekend.

Fire Island

I don’t know what the heck I was worrying about. I went to Fire Island yesterday and had a terrific time. It felt great to be alive.

Getting there is a convoluted trip. First you have to get to Penn Station. Then you take the Long Island Railroad out to Sayville, switching trains at one point. Once you get to Sayville, you get into a van that takes you to the ferry. Then you wait for the ferry. Then you ride the ferry across the water, and, finally, you’ve arrived at the Gay Valhalla. Er, Fire Island.

The mental associations that my mind had made with Fire Island kept returning to me during the day. Didn’t Terrence McNally write a couple of plays that take place on Fire Island? And didn’t someone once remark on how the AIDS crisis was leaving the summer homes emptier and emptier as the 1980s went on?

There were about 25 of us in all, and we found a wide swath of beach. It was less crowded than I expected. We all lay our towels out, and people began taking off their shirts. I was struck by how un-porn-star-ish everybody looked. They all looked like normal guys — a couple of them overweight, most of them completely unmuscled. This was not a group of gym-going guys, and nobody cared. So I decided I had nothing to worry about. Like a jump into an ocean of cold water, I took off my shirt.

And nobody gasped.

In fact, nobody seemed to care, or even notice. Heck, I didn’t even care. And I didn’t even have trouble getting people to put suntan lotion on my back a few times throughout the day.

We lay on our towels, we talked, we walked, we sunned, we swam.

The water was cold. Walking into a chilly ocean is terrifying at first, especially when the icy water starts licking at your balls. Yikes! But eventually I decided, as I always wind up deciding at the beach, that the shock of the cold water won’t hurt ya, just go for it. So I dunked myself underwater, caught my breath sharply, and jumped around like a maniac, trying to shake off the chill. I felt all tingly. But eventually I got used to the water.

There were these two guys with us who are a couple. One of them is an officer of the Twentysomething group. The other one isn’t. They’re both nice guys. I’d met them both several times before. And perhaps I was imagining it, but I could have sworn that the other one was taking an interest in me. I sometimes have trouble distinguishing friendliness from sexual interest, so I could have been wrong. But it was fun anyway.

We seemed to hit it off really well, and we spent lots of time talking to each other. He gave me his Snapple and some of his strawberries. Wales and Ontario and a couple of guys had gone off for a walk, and my towel had been with theirs, so instead of sitting there alone I decided to move my towel over next to the boyfriends’ towels. Why not, right? It’s the beach, have fun, relax.

In the afternoon several of us went into the water again. The waves were so big — piston-driven, monstrous, scary creatures. A couple of the guys took off their swimsuits, and then I did too, and then a few more did. I was swimming nude in the ocean with a bunch of gay guys. It was liberating, and sexual, and electric, and awesome.

Later in the afternoon the boyfriend told me we should go into the water again. So a group of us did it again, and took off our swimsuits again. The tide was even stronger than before, and the big waves aggressively pounded my naked body into the sand. Eventually I couldn’t feel my toes and I knew it was time to get out again.

Me and the attractive boyfriend and a third guy decided to go for a quick walk before we all packed up and headed off for dinner, but the quick walk took about 25 minutes. When we got back, the boyfriend’s boyfriend and another guy were waiting for us, saying that everyone else had left. So we quickly changed our clothes, and then the five of us left the beach and made our way from the Pines to Cherry Grove, passing through the Meat Rack, as I believe it was called — the place that Blogstalker referred to in the previous entry’s comments as “The Enchanted Forest.” I wasn’t sure what Blogstalker was talking about, but now I get it. Heheh.

You go through this area of woods. All these narrow winding paths among the trees. I felt like I was in “The Lord of the Rings,” making my way through strange places on an important quest for adventure. But we weren’t looking for adventure — we were just trying to find a way out of there. We took some wrong turns and saw condoms and condom wrappers on the ground, and at several points we’d see a solitary horny man, waiting for whatever excitement the woods and its denizens might bring. The men weren’t very attractive, and it was kinda creepy, so eventually we made our way out of the woods and walked along boardwalks past summer homes with names like “Old Yellow” and “Thimk Pimk” and so on.

We met up with the rest of the group for dinner. Afterwards, we all hung around and then went back to the darkened beach. And then we went back to the ferry landing, where we hopped on board and did the reverse trip back to the city. More than three hours later, at 1:00 in the morning, tired, sandy, smelling like suntan lotion, I got home. Hopped into the shower, scrubbed myself clean, went to bed. During the night I kept waking up, still charged up with energy and excitement about the great day I’d had.

God, I didn’t realize I missed the beach so much. It was so nice to get away from the city. Where is the summer going? Here it is, the middle of July, and I’ve just now made my first trip to the beach this season. Where is it going?

It would be so great to have a summer house on Fire Island, or a share in one. I think this is now a goal for me. Sometime in the next ten years, I’d like to be able to afford a share in a summer home on Fire Island, so I can go there every weekend and hang out on the beach during the day and enjoy the summery windswept chilly nights, listening to the waves crashing in the darkness.

And I will be able to afford it… and I’ll have great times… and my job situation and my financial situation will turn out fine, and everything else in my life will turn out fine, because none of the really stupid little things matter at all. I mean, so I’ve got some hair on my back. It’s just hair! What’s the big deal? I spent the day on Fire Island, and I had a great time, and that’s all that matters.