Category Archives: General

It’s kind of like the last time you have sex with an ex: you don’t really know it’s the last time until afterward. The same goes for the last swim of the season. In this case, I thought this day was going to be the last day – only it turn out there would be one more. Now, at the time of this writing in October, I can say with certainty that the last time in the pool was the last time in the pool for this year.

Luckily (or unluckily) for you there was documentation of the days in question, and for this first part here’s the sunny day I thought would be the last but wasn’t.

(There’s a lot more male nudity in Part II, so come back this afternoon…)

The Last Chrysanthemum

By Thomas Hardy

Why should this flower delay so long,
To show its tremulous plumes? 
Now is the time of plaintive robin-song, 
When flowers are in their tombs.

Through the slow summer, when the sun
Called to each frond and whorl
That all he could for flowers was being done,
Why did it not uncurl?

It must have felt that fervid call
Although it took no heed,
Waking but now, when leaves like corpses fall,
And saps all retrocede.

Too late its beauty, lonely thing,
The season’s shine is spent,
Nothing remains for it but shivering
In tempests turbulent.

Had it a reason for delay,
Dreaming in witlessness
That for a bloom so delicately gay
Winter would stay its stress?

– I talk as if the thing were born
With sense to work its mind;
Yet it is but one mask of many worn
By the Great Face behind.

Goldenrod

By Mary Oliver

On roadsides,
  in fall fields,
      in rumpy bunches,
          saffron and orange and pale gold, 

in little towers,
  soft as mash,
      sneeze-bringers and seed-bearers,
          full of bees and yellow beads and perfect flowerlets 

and orange butterflies.
  I don’t suppose
      much notice comes of it, except for honey,
           and how it heartens the heart with its 

blank blaze.
  I don’t suppose anything loves it, except, perhaps,
      the rocky voids
          filled by its dumb dazzle. 

For myself,
  I was just passing by, when the wind flared
      and the blossoms rustled,
          and the glittering pandemonium 

leaned on me.
  I was just minding my own business
      when I found myself on their straw hillsides,
          citron and butter-colored, 

and was happy, and why not?
  Are not the difficult labors of our lives
      full of dark hours?
          And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, 

that is better than these light-filled bodies?
  All day
       on their airy backbones
           they toss in the wind, 

they bend as though it was natural and godly to bend,
  they rise in a stiff sweetness,
      in the pure peace of giving
           one’s gold away.

How we ever got to October this quickly is a mystery to me, but life is good when it moves with alacrity. Sadness and uncertainty are what slow things down. The past week flew by, and there is a backlog of travel and fun events that I’ll eventually get around to posting, or not, as I’ve been spending less time behind the keyboard and more time out in the world. So to keep things brief, on with the weekly recap for this Monday morning.

Transitioning from summer to fall (and September to October) means that there are still hot days to be had, and hot men as well. Let’s begin with Brandon Rubendall, Brenton Thwaites and Colin Brazeau.

It was a week of uncharacteristic laughter (at least for here.) In real life I’m much more gregarious than I allow my voice to be on this blog. I’m not sure why. Survival, perhaps. But I broke down that wall of serious intent with this Auntie Fee post, and a laughter-inducing clip of Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader.

It was a week that saw summer slowly slide out of the Cape, but it did so in a way that was subtle and sweet and gloriously simple. The Mermaid of Shore Road was back in effect.

My last single friend got married. (But more on that later…)

Who knew such color could come from Cambridge?

Not one poem for fall, but two.

Finally, there were even more Hunks to keep the warmth pulsating, like David Terzian, Ben Affleck, and Jackson Lombardi.

PS – All right, the week was really all about this: Nick Jonas grabbing his crotch and baring his butt cheeks.

A Song for Autumn

In the deep fall
    don’t you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
    the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
    freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
    warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep
    inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
    the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
    vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
    its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
    the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.

~ Mary Oliver

Behind me the Bourne Bridge grows smaller in the distance, and a mermaid swims deeper into the recesses of memory. I am heading West, but I won’t get far. Home is still in upstate New York, just one state beyond Massachusetts, and a relatively short distance, though it feels a world away. The weekends go by too quickly, especially in the fall.

Fall itself feels fleeting, at least at the start, at the pretty part. Before it all goes brown and dead. Then fall slows its march, drawing out the cold and setting up a lengthy preamble to winter. We are a decent distance from that right now, so let’s now dwell on the inevitable. Not just yet. The sun can still be warm. The sky can still be blue. The summer can still be remembered.

Fall Song

Back when I was attending Brandeis University in the mid-90’s (cue age-related shriek) I would occasionally walk from Porter Square to Harvard Square. Though they are but one T-stop apart, the walk was of decent length, and perfect for a bit of mind-clearing and contemplation. At that time, there wasn’t much more than a few stores scattered rather far between one another, but since then a number have moved into the space. I walked this stretch the last time I was in town, and stopped at the space seen in these photos.

As can be gleaned, it was a colorfully eclectic collection of objects from around the world – charming bits of wreckage that, taken together, formed an overwhelming sensation of sensory overload in the best possible manner.

Sometimes more is more.

Crepe paper flowers always make me smile.

Cambridge certainly knows how to make a colorful impression.

Today my friends Chris and Darcey are celebrating their wedding. I don’t have all that much wisdom as a married man, but I have a few ideas that might help in their small quiet way (particularly for someone like Chris, who somehow manages to be tardy all the time.)

1. Don’t be late.

2. You may not mean it, but you’re going to have to say ‘I’m sorry’ at some point.

3. There are no right answers to the question, “How do I look?” Sorry. (See above.)

4. When all else fails, it is never wrong to say, “I love you” – and then do it. 

5. Don’t be fucking late.

When I was a kid, the only time I got into trouble at school was for laughing. There would be times when I was laughing so hard my gut ached and tears were streaming down my face. Usually it happened at the most inopportune mounts: quiet reading, moments of silence, or any other serious time when laughter was frowned upon (church was the worst.) Sometimes it would be laughter that built on itself, and the original trigger wasn’t even all that funny. My friend Ann was the best at bringing that out in me, and to this day I can think of a few moments and still fall into deep troves of laughter just at the memory of them.

These days, those bouts of laughter are fewer and farther between, but they still happen, like when I watched this clip of Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader. It doesn’t matter what’s so funny, and by the end of it I defy you not to crack a smile or crack entirely up. I had to pause and leave the room because my stomach was hurting so much from laughing so hard.

There’s something so intensely satisfying about a hearty spell of laughter. It changes the world.

She’s crass, vulgar, messy, and downright ornery. She adds tequila to strawberry shortcake and seasons her chicken wings in the kitchen sink. She turns ‘paprika’ into a four-syllable word. She is Auntie Fee, and I absolutely adore her. As the living anti-thesis of Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey, she drops f-bombs right and left, while cussing out her put-upon camera-man if he misses a beat. I’m not sure how I came upon her series of videos, but whenever I need a quick pick-me-up, I check out a new one and laugh like an idiot at her cooking lessons. (Warning: language is NSFW, but most of this blog is NSFW.)

(Skip to 2:14 for the pap-a-rika meltdown!)

I love her spirit, and her candor, as well as her penchant for being such a potty mouth. There’s an exuberance to her cooking style that makes up for its lack of precision (or wisdom, given the fact that she seems to prefer frying above all other forms of cooking). This sense of living for the moment, and living kind of recklessly, has always fascinated me. Coming from a strict and regimented set of parents, where this sort of behavior in the kitchen would have been unthinkable, I find her to be a breath of fresh air.  She’s appeared on Jimmy Kimmel because she’s hilarious, but it’s her homemade videos that show off her own brand of charm.

How have we reached the last day of September? Tempus fugit indeed. (I guess all those years of Latin finally paid off, in a single blog sentence that no one under 30 is going to get.) The sigh of time. We’ll get to October tomorrow – for now, let’s bask in Septembers past.

Beginning with last year, in which September saw several musical posts. Music always seems to get a little deeper at this time of the year, slightly more somber and serious.

September 2012 was a bit eclectic. There was music, but there were sperm quotes and sexy men as well, including a follow-up battle of who had the better butt: Channing Tatum or Joe Manganiello?

Madonna, Anderson Cooper, and my naked spa experiences made up the bulk of posts from September 2011. Sorry about that last one, it just had to be done.

The same goes for September 2010.

What a long strange week it’s been on the blog. Life is like that sometimes, and my life seems to grow stranger by the day. Time unfolds differently here, when some entries are made weeks after the events chronicled have occurred, or other a few hours after they’ve happened. It keeps readers guessing (and makes it impossible for would-be thieves to know when I’m home, or when my retired police officer of a husband might be guarding the house in my absence.) Anyway, here’s a recap of the week:

I saw a freaking moose on the Massachusetts Turnpike. (I didn’t get pictures because I was driving.)

We said goodbye to summer, not once, but twice.

It’s only a matter of time.

The Hunks of the Day were both sexy and sweet-smelling, thanks to Ugo Monye and Joross Gamboa.

We’re still trying to determine whether this ridiculous Starbucks episode was the fault of the coffee company, or the Price Chopper in which it is housed. Whichever the case, the kinks still haven’t been ironed out.

The infamous Suzie Ko.

A new baby joins the scene, in Washington, DC (the site of this outrageous Bachelor Party.)

One more Hunk of the Day: the bodybuilder whose sexy nude videos leaked, Michael Hoffman, in all his glory.

Last but most certainly not least, Tom Daley took it off in this shameless video.

“Are you adamantly opposed to having male strippers at your Bachelor party?” I asked my straight friend Chris, who had rather foolishly and recklessly chosen me as his Best Man.

His one-word reply was filled with typical wariness and weariness: “Yes.”

“Fine,” I huffed, “but don’t blame me if no one has a good time.”

I was deep in the planning stages for his Bachelor party, as that is apparently one of the Best Man’s duties. I knew I’d make a bad best man – the only other time I acted as one was for my brothers wedding, and we know how that marriage turned out. For Chris, it was different. He’d been clear about the fact that we were older now, and wiser, and no longer in need of strippers and boozing. Tasked with those limitations, the field for Bachelor Party play narrowed considerably. I knew I had to do something more impressive than taking him to a fancy restaurant and giving some lame toast, so I went back – way back. Two decades back, to when he first met the crew you see assembled in these photos. The original group of College Ave. kids from Cornell. I secretly invited them to surprise Chris leading up to the hours of his Bachelor’s dinner. One by one they arrived at the door, all of them showing up (some of us from as far as upstate NY), as testament to our friend.

Twenty years is a long time to maintain anything – even, and sometimes especially, friendships. Yet here we all were, a little worn and torn from two decades of living and all that it entailed: births and deaths, weddings and break-ups, reunions and distance and moves and mayhem. All of the good and all of the bad, and still this group held it together, holding onto one another for support, finding out way back no matter how much time had passed.

There was so much to say, but we didn’t need to say it. As they gathered on the steps for a reunion photo, I was transported back to the day in Ithaca when I took a similar photo. It was 1997, and the last time I’d visit them when they were in college. It was an impromptu gathering on a day that had started off rainy but cleared for a brief peek of sun. We sat on the porch steps perched on the edge of the rest of our lives, not quite realizing that we were already there, that it had already begun. That this might have been happiness.

It seems strange to start a recap of a Bachelor Party with a baby, but such is the way Chris began the rollicking celebration of his final moments of Bachelorhood. In fairness to the questionable execution of my duties as Best Man, I did consult with him about what he wanted out of a party considering that we were one year shy of 40, and no longer in the mood or mindset for strip clubs and bar-hopping, and he claimed to be down for a quiet night of dinner. I was up for that, and happy to make the quick flight to Washington, DC to take him out for one final night on the town before the wedding.

Before the evening began, however, I had some free time in DC, so I walked down to the White House and had Thai for lunch. Suzie was flying in early in the afternoon, and by the time I returned to the hotel she was just getting in. After a confused cab driver drove by the house, we finally found our way to Chris and Darcey’s, where we got to met baby Simon.

This is why Bachelor Parties just aren’t as important as they may have been a few years ago. Life has a way of changing, and in this case it was most decidedly for the better.

As one of my last close friends to get married, and have a child, Chris used to be my partner in crime whenever we needed to get away from the grown-up responsibilities of relationships and family and just go back to a simpler, and often crazier, time. That hasn’t changed completely, but things are different in a sweeter way. As I was reminded of when Suzie and I got to meet Simon. He didn’t come easily into the world, and he waged quite the battle to make it, but he’s here now, and he’s a gift. Better than anything I could have conjured for a wedding present.

Still, I had some surprises up my sleeve for what Chris originally thought was a night out with me alone. Our last single friend was getting hitched. Respect had to be paid. It was my duty as Best Man…

{To be continued}