MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE BEACH...

I apologize to those of you who might be wondering whatever happened to our trip to the Cape, and even to those of you who wonder what I mean no matter what I say. [Sorry. What you see, alas, is what you get.]

P'town was fun. I will probably never enjoy it as much as the Goat, for whom it has all sorts of personal and political resonance, but the Cape Cod National Seashore is an amazing thing, and P'town is in the middle of it. As luck would have it, of course, we wound up leaving from the Big Woods instead of from Nowheresville, which doubled the length of the trip... An incredibly stupid idea, given the price of gas, but there we are.

We missed the crush of the film festival, but landed in the middle of the Portuguese festival. I suppose we [Massachusetts] will be holding a Wampanoag Festival at Plymouth Rock soon: why is it that you always celebrate what you have just wiped out? or don't celebrate it until it is wiped out?

(Further north, the complete hegemony of the Summer People has led to a welcome if curious interest in Vermont "folk" life as well, which is to say, what life was like before They got there. And in the meantime, the "real" Vermonters wonder when they lost control of it all--as evidenced by all those "Take Back Vermont" signs and stickers after the civil unions vote. Doesn't 2001 and Vermont's so-called radicalism all feel very long ago and far away? It is. Even the Granite State has civil unions--so much for "Live Free or Die," at least in Meldrim Thomson's sense. How sad it must be to be for all them granola-chomping tree-huggers to be crowded by New Hampshire and then trumped by the Big Bad Bay State again...)

The weather was not as good as we would have liked, but it wasn't as bad as we were led to believe it would be, so we got enough sun for me to get royally burned [not at the beach, where we used sunscreen, but just biking around town] and got in enough beach-time to make us [me] feel the drive had been worth it. I especially enjoyed the chance to sunbathe, and just plain bathe, in the nude again. Swimming nude in the ocean is one of life's minor pleasures, but a real one nonetheless.

When it rained, we watched movies: our own little Provincetown International Film Festival, though the screen would have been rather too small for a paying audience, and I don't know how we would have dealt with the crowds that apparently mobbed Gael Garcia Bernal and Quention Tarantino. (We did have two rooms, but they were not all that big...)

We enjoyed the occasional company of our hosts, who are old friends of the Goat's, high-powered Boston professionals who zip in and out of town with great verve; we were definitely the Poor Relations, but it's a role I've played rather a lot in my life, and as long as I am treated as well as we were, it is not one I am about to pass up for the sake of my supposed dignity.

As you may well ask at this point: WHAT dignity?

We did not go out and do the bar thing, though I had been advised to lug a lot of leather along, which I did. It just didn't happen, somehow. And that was OK with me, though I don't have much opportunity to wear it all in public... We did buy a lot of expensive coffee [see above] and we did some shopping--some things are just easier to find in a majority-gay environment...

Well, we are back. I am back. I even got my first Big City trip under my belt, and got my contract signed for the job, so no matter what happens from here on out, I feel better about it. No sign of either my Old Boss or the Lord High Everything Else, which is normal, but may be why the Bean-Counter was suddenly back to his old dismissive ways. That's his problem. I have the job, and a piece of paper to hide behind should the fur start to fly.

Now it's back to pulling ever bigger rabbits out of ever smaller hats...
Stay tuned.
Just don't hold your breath...

Hang in there, guys.
C