all i can picture is his ursine buttocks

today i collected a seventeen dollar tip.

after playing the flirt to a series of unsure masculine types in muted t-shirts and girls with eye-catching handbags, i strolled down hall street. i smoked pot at the bus stop on cole. the rest of my walk was pleasant. the partly cloudy weather was conducive to my banal grey, black, and white outfit appearing much more rakish than had i originally thought having left for work this morning. the descrying sun made for more vivid visuals; the geometric phosphenes to which i’m accustomed to see after getting high were intensified.

that’s what i love about mathematics: it’s everywhere. tangibly and intangibly. topology, orthogonal groups, klein four groups, mendelbrot sets, snowflakes – i love it.

the boys were nice today: at j.r.’s, my first drink, a manhattan, was picked up by one of the barbacks (who graces me with a friendly peck every time we have the pleasure of seeing each other), and my second, an old-fashioned, was only two dollars. with my old-fashioned, i had a tuna roll, a surprisingly tasty pairing with whiskey and orange — must have been the ginger.

at alexandre’s, i was surprised to find that tyler, the sub bartender, had bought both of my scotches. that a bartender from alexandre’s had picked up my drink(s) is not so unexpected so much it was tyler himself.

we have rarely talked. and perhaps it is because i am so in awe of his inexorable beauty that i can hardly find anything to talk to him about (a characteristic of his that i should learn to overlook and a characteristic of mine that i should really learn to hone), but perhaps it is also that we seem to have so little in common when we both talk; our humors and topics of conversation are so disparate.

** whatevs, i’m sure it’s me just being sloshed on scotch and considering everything so myopically.

afterwards, i went back to JRs and met stephen, a suitor who, after declining several advances, i agreed to go to dinner. we went to the vietnamese place around the corner. what we talked about was probably best described as “drunk shit”: the quotidian parts of our day, the overly-assiduous barback waiting for our water glasses to fall to three-quarters full, how to hold chop sticks.

it was nice. i got his phone number. he looks like scarby (remarkably so), sans the curly hair, goofy laugh, and the flannel — and i guess in better shape.

on my way back to the west village, i got someone else’s number too.

it must just be one of those lucky weeks.