Chilltown Bears

After a week of forecasts predicting rain on Sunday, the sun broke out and it turned out to be a glorious spring day in the NY Metro area.  So Joe, Ryan, and I headed up to Hoboken NJ (one town north of us) for their Spring Arts and Music Festival.  It was packed and a whole lot of fun.  Tents lined Washington Street from Observer Highway to 7th Street.  Great food from many of the local restaurants, and hundreds of artists and craftspeople showing their wares.  All the restaurants and their sidewalk cafes and bars too were packed. Lots of live music as well, including Mickey Dolenz from the Monkees yesterday!  What a hoot!  Of course men.  Mostly straight, but still handsome and hunky, there were men everywhere you looked – my eyes hurt as they spun around in their sockets   We ended the day with some gelato and headed on home.  We also enjoy the Italian Festival which takes place in September in Frank Sinatra Park along the waterfront in Hoboken.  Great ways to spend the day. CARLOS

It was a light day for me schedule-wise and I could see Joe was climbing the walls, so we decided to go for a drive.  We ended up at his office in Englewood Cliffs.  Long drive.  He hadn’t seen his co-workers since he went on disability in mid-February.  Not one person said “Oh, it’s You.”  It was all hugs, kisses, and tears.  A sickening display, LOL.  They’re all like, ‘now don’t come back until you’re fully recovered’… meanwhile I’m like, ‘back to work you lazy bastard!’

Just kidding, really, but it is taking every ounce of strength I have not to turn from Florence Nightingale into Nurse Ratched.  Familiarity breeds contempt as they say.  We’re no exception.  Almost 14 years of our almost 18 years together we’ve been in each other’s company 24/7, first co-owning a business for many years, then after we sold it, going to work for the same employer.  I hear people congratulating other gay couples on their years together, and I’m like, honey, we measure our relationship in dog years!

But I digress.  This post is about chicken– spicy saucy chicken.  On the way home, we drove down River Road hugging the Hudson and decided to stop at Whole Foods in Edgewater for lunch.  I glanced past the salad bar and noticed for the first time an Indian Food bar.  The savory chickpeas were nice, so was the eggplant/potato mushy-stuff, but the Chicken Tikka Masala was *delicious*  Better than any I had ordered previously in a restaurant.  I wanted to bathe in the heavenly stew.

So my latest fixation?  Learning how to cook Indian food well.  The test kitchens are open!  I just located dozens of recipes– even found crockpot ones.  Tum, tum, tum, tum… TUMS! CARLOS

Joe, Ryan, and I, along with Luis and his boyfriend Will, headed out to Bears on the Run 2008 at NYC’s GLBT Community Center on Sunday.  We first stopped for a great brunch at Artepasta in Greenwich Village.  The show was totally enjoyable.. the music, the comedy, the camaraderie– I even got to slap Kendall’s asscheeks as part of the performance, and he’s welcome to return the favor anytime.   The show put on by that lecherous creep next to me though – tickling my palm as we shook hands then foisting himself on the two guys in wheelchairs who couldn’t wheel away fast enough – made me want to beat him like a circus monkey.  If I were in one of those chairs, he would have left with a thread mark on his face.  In the immortal words of Alicia Silverstone as Cher in Clueless… AS IF! CARLOS

(Pictured above left to right: Shannon Grady, Kendall, Matthew Temple, Elijah Black, and Bobaloo.)

Ryan and I headed over to the Original GLBT Expo at the Jacob Javits Center today.  Joe stayed home, wasn’t feeling up to standing for hours.  I on the other hand can’t live without bags of goodies and getting to sample the latest funky liquor they’re trying to pawn off on the gay community — this year’s being green by the way, in a bottle that looked like a prop from the bar in Ten-Forward on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Nothing was memorable about the show, except for my visit to The Loft‘s booth.  The Loft is the GLBT community center for Westchester County in White Plains NY.  A bear behind the table was glaring at me so I stepped over and asked “Where do we know each other from?”  He said, he loves my website and jerks off to it regularly.  Ehm, huh?  I thought, wow people with degrees in English Literature really don’t know what to do with their education after school.  I mean, maybe I’m occasionally clever or profound in my blog musings, but this is ridiculous.

Then it dawned on me — he meant the other website — the one of few words but much skin.  Oops.  I shared with him that although I’ve received more than a few private emails from people who’ve touched themselves inappropriately to those pix over the years since my American Bear spread, he was the first person to say it out loud and in public.

Oy. CARLOS

No, no, no, not RETARD, its RETARD, with a French accent, like in Je suis arrivé avec 45 minutes de retard au rendez-vous. I was 45 minutes late for my noon lunch with my friend Dan at A.O.C., a great French bistro on Bleecker Street at the corner of Grove in Greenwich Village.  I’m usually punctual for basically everything, but this morning getting ready to go shower I fell asleep on the couch watching People’s Court. The last thing I remember was Judge Marilyn Milian telling some guy with a bowtie that he had made a real “arroz con mango” out of things. Read more »