the flood.

Last time I gave you the soapbox gay pride weekend talk. This time I'll give you the what the hell happened on gay pride weekend talk. As expected, I headed into Boston to watch the parade in the rain. It always amazes me how no one in the parade seems to notice they are soaking wet and marching through puddles. But hey, what the hell. After the parade, I headed to the women's block party with a few friends. This is an outdoor event, but you can go into any of the bars in the area to escape the predicted rain. The downside to doing this is that you basically step into a time-warp where there is almost total darkness, thumping techno music, and in your drunk state you're confused, disoriented, and not sure whether it is day or night. I felt like Dracula coming back into the sun after being in a club dancing for 20 minutes. If I had stayed in there 10 minutes longer I probably would have hissed and scowled at the sun upon emerging.

Day drinking is not my friend, and somewhere around 3 o'clock I had had enough and headed home to regroup myself for the evenings activity of more drinking and dancing. Since I had consumed my weight in bagels earlier that morning at brunch, my first (still slightly buzzed) thought upon arriving home was, "Hey, I should go for a run!" So I grabbed my dog and headed out to stumble-run around the neighborhood for 30 minutes.

Bad Decision: Going for a run with alcohol in your system.
Better Bad Decision:  Using this as an excuse to call passing out in the middle of the day a "nap."

C'mon. That run was exhausting.
A couple solid hours of sleep in and back to Boston I went. The women's dance party was being held a Machine, which is a fairly large facility. Being gay pride weekend, this was probably at least one of their biggest nights of the year, if not the biggest. I suck at estimating numbers of people, so let's just say there were approximately shit-hundred people in the club. Everyone is dancing and drinking happily when about an hour into the night a water main breaks. Liquid begins to fill the hallway and floor area near the biggest bathroom in the place. Then an announcement is made.

Attention. Unfortunately one of our water mains has broken and we will have to shut off the two bathrooms on the first floor. Please use the bathroom in the back or the one upstairs.

Now picture a stampede of drunk people who have to pee.
Instantly the bathroom lines are 50 people deep everywhere.
Instantly I have to pee.

It's like when you are trapped in a car in traffic and as soon as you realize it would be impossible for you to access a bathroom for at least half an hour, you also realize you have to pee like a mother fucker. Much like wanting women, unavailability also makes you want bathrooms. So for the rest of the night you had to anticipate when you would need to pee, and go stand in line about 20-30 minutes before you thought that would happen. I am not exaggerating. The shortest line I stood in that night for the bathroom was 20 minutes. The longest was 40. This is all setting the stage for something...

These are actually gay women.

Towards the end of the night I attempted the upstairs bathroom line, found it wasn't too long (this was the 20 minute one) and added myself to the queue. As I moved up in line, I stood innocently chatting with a friend, just passing the time. La de da. When all of a sudden I felt a splash of warmth on my foot. I knew immediately what it was. (Spilled drinks are cold.) I turned to the girl next to me, who had an expression of half relief/half "who me?".

          ME:  Did you just pee on me?
          DEPENDS:  What? No. (Even these 2 words were slurred.)
          ME:  You did. You just peed on me.
          DEPENDS:  Looks the opposite way.
          ME:  You are peeing right now! There is currently pee coming out of you.

I looked down to verify my suspicion and sure enough there was pee streaming out from under her dress, down this chick's legs, and onto the bar floor. It should be noted that we were no where near the flooded area, so she was literally just peeing onto the dry floor of a bar.

I ran through a quick checklist.
Have I been stung by a jellyfish? No.
Do I have a rash or hives? No.
Is there a blemish on my foot? No.
Am I into being peed on? Definitely No.

Yeah, definitely not acceptable that I just got peed on. In my current horrified/intoxicated state I made a little bit of a scene about being peed on in that line. The fact that no one else seemed as horrified as I did only incited me to continue to make eye contact with everyone in that line going "She PEED on me. I just got PEED on." Looking back, that chick was wasted and despite the NOT OKness of it all, I shouldn't have further embarrassed her like I did. I don't know that girl, but I am sure this was a new low for her. And if it wasn't, then I'd like to hear some of her stories. The saddest part of the whole thing? She was only 2 people away from her turn to go. So close. So very very close.

I washed my foot in the sink, went back downstairs, danced the rest of the night away, and tried unsuccessfully to tell my story to all my drunk friends. (None of which understood the true horror of what had happened until the next morning.) Thankfully (silver lining) I was able to secure a snuggle partner for the night, because if you don't deserve to be the little spoon after being peed on by a stranger, I dont' know when you do.

Life Lesson: If you're at the point where you will pee on someone else, it's OK to cut the line.

Gotta love loopholes.
-LSLP, Ash.

seriously gay.

This blog is usually all fun and games. All, "hey, here's another bad decision I made that led to amazing(?) times. Let's all laugh at Ashly." But let's get serious for a hot minute here. There are some things we need to address because they are that massively important. Like Boston Gay Pride weekend. (If you're straight and you read this blog, you must now bump up Pride Weekend 10 notches on the list of things that are important to you. Because it's important to me, and I'm important to you, so now Gay Pride is important to you too. Do you see how that works? Congratulations, you just became an ally.)

Those elephants are being inappropriate.

In 2008, I wrote the below, italicized, blog post on a private blog that I never shared with the public. June is Gay Pride month, so the time to share is now:

Boston [gay] pride is this weekend, and for the first time in the history of my gayness it is not supposed to rain (Sadly, in 2011, we are back to our regularly scheduled program of it raining on my parade). Now i love watching a drag queen's cover girl foundation drip off her face under the safety of my umbrella as much as the next guy. but i would still rather dive for Jagger key chains and equality stickers from the safety of dry ground (sticker's don't stick once their wet you know).
Pride weekend usually involves a lot of drinking, a lot of partying, and a lot of noise. Many outsiders, and even some gays, look at the parade and festivities and think,"how unnecessary." Some people even go so far as to compare our unnecessary parades and pride events to the lack of straight pride parades, African-American pride parades, or Italian pride parades. They ask, "if these groups don't need parades, then why do the gays?"
And so, i give you this:

The march on Washington allowed African-Americans to have a dream and to move towards it. Towards equality. Today African-Americana's have parades in cities such as Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.

Picking up after the holocaust and moving forward allowed the Jewish population to move towards safety. Towards equality. Today Jewish families have parades in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis.

The marches held by the women's suffrage movement allowed women to move towards the right to vote. Towards equality. Today, women are equal.

Parades are typically thought to represent joy; to bring about emotions of happiness and awe at the floats and people in the parades. But the undertones of many parades are buried in hate and oppression. When African-Americans, Jews, Italians, Muslims, women, or gays march down the street in colorful costumes aboard floats depicting their cultures, they are being pushed by the scorn of their past, and sometimes of their present.
This weekend is for the people that have fought so hard to get us to the place we are.
This weekend is for the people who make it OK for me to hold the hand of the person I love. 
This weekend is for the people that allow me to feel like my life is right.
I am proud of you. And I am proud of the people who will push for us going forward.

I look forward to the day when we don't have to parade.
I look forward to the day when there is no pride weekend.
Because on that day, every day will be a day to be proud.
And there will be no need for a parade.
So yeah, I will wave my flag.

Something to keep in mind as we all get wasted dancing among the gays this weekend.

Bad Decision:  Hating others based on the people they love.
Better Bad Decision:  Realizing you might be wrong, and opening your mind.

Life Lesson: There is no agenda. Just the desire for understanding and acceptance.

Party on,Homos.
-LSLP, Ash.

lesbian spring break.

Every year on memorial day weekend The Great Lesbian Migration occurs and homos from all over flock to Provincetown for a weekend of excessive intoxication, dancing, and drama. I've been on 3 previous occasions, during 2 of which I was unintentionally involved in fights. (The 3rd time I was there was a day trip, and thus the opportunity for my involvement in a homo war was decreased.) So I braced myself for the impact and agreed to go down for one night at the end of the weekend.

It's a fairly long drive down to P-Town, so I made the executive decision to take the ferry from Boston Harbor. I won't deny that the driving factor behind this choice was the ability to begin drinking Bloody Mary's at 9am the second I boarded the ferry (OK, so I only made it to the vicinity of the docks before I started). I still needed to transport myself to the ferry from my suburban home though, so in the most convoluted route ever, I drove to Allston where I then participated in a thousand T transfers (in reality 4) and ended up in Boston Harbor. I had also chosen the ferry under the logic that due to the lesbian migration, everyone on the ferry would be a hot lesbian I could make friends with. Wrong. So, so wrong. It was me, a bunch of two-daddy families, and some older straight couples from out of state who didn't know what they were in for.

I have no lesbians. You are alone.

I was planning on staying with my friends Crissy and Ellen, as well as 3 fabulous gay boys. So upon arrival in P-Town I headed to the cottage I was staying in to meet them, and arrived to an elaborate breakfast spread in progress. Now while I was on the boat, Crissy had texted me with a question:

         

         CRISSY: Do you want breakfast?

          ME:        No thanks...I had a muffin.

But if you saw my arrival at the cottage you would have thought it had gone more like this:

          CRISSY: Do you want breakfast?

          ME:         FEED ME. I AM RAVENOUSLY HUNGRY.

As soon as we sat down to eat, I had completed my entire plate of french toast, eggs, and fruit before anyone else had finished applying butter and syrup. Fucking muffin.

Note how my hands are still suspiciously near my plate.

After a short food coma and some domestic cleaning of dishes, we headed down the street to a pool party at one of the hotels/bars. Generally I struggle with what to order to drink on vacation. It's vacation, so automatically I feel like I can't get what I normally get at home (because that wouldn't be special), so I usually just end up standing there for 10 minutes before I copy what someone else is drinking and end up dissatisfied.  The pool party, however, pleasantly displayed an abundance of people wandering around drinking out of sand-pail-sized buckets filled with tropical goodness. If there is the option to drink out of a bucket, is there really any other acceptable choice? No. No, there is not.

So I ordered my drink by pointing to the stack of buckets and saying, "One of those please." Then a girl walked up to the bar next to me, saw my giant drink with a handle AND straw, and became intrigued.

          GIRL: Hey, what's that called?

          Me:    I have no idea. I just pointed to the bucket.

          Girl looks at me, looks at my bucket, looks at the bartender...

          GIRL: Um, can I have a bucket of alcohol please?

Can it be possible to only order drinks this way from now on?

Shortly after this, I ran into Irina who promptly asked me what the fuck I was wearing (blue khaki's, brown tank top, loose button down white oxford, and boat shoes. Normal party attire right? ...no?) and began stripping off my clothing trying to make me closer to the apparently required level of skin appearance. I informed her that we don't know when the next yacht could arrive, but I would be ready to get on one when it does.

Later that night we headed out for a little party hopping. First stop: Foam Party. This really should have been called "Foam In A Corner Party", because that would have given a much more accurate idea of what you were going to encounter. We observed the people parting in the foam:

• There were about 200 lesbians not in the foam.
• There were about 15 lesbians in the foam.
• The non-foam lesbians all appeared grossed out by the foam lesbians.
• Once you joined the foam lesbians, you were now relegated to only the foam lesbians.

We made a strategic decision: We would not be going in the foam. The odds just didn't make sense.

As I consumed an additional drink, I began to wish I had someone to dance with that was gay, but not a man (although our gay boys were exceptionally fun to dance with). One of the guys that was staying with us had a boyfriend who had stayed home sick that night, and he was therefore not on the prowl for anyone.
Perfect.
Hello Gayman Wingman.
I described to Gayman Wingman what my ideal girl would look like and the two of us scanned the small room. A sea of spiky hair, board shorts, and beaters. Time to move on. The entire group transferred into the street and I realized I had to urinate before I could go any further.

          ME:         I have to pee!
          CRISSY: We'll just pop a squat somewhere along the way. Let's gooooooo!!
          ME:         What? No...there's a bathroom right here in this place nextdoor.
          CRISSY: Come ooooon!!
          ME:         But it's just right through that door...
          CRISSY: I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR DOORS.

Godadamn doors. Always slowing people down by making them pull and push them. The nerve. After the bathroom trip (through the doors), we moved down the street to a place called Boatslip. This is an indoor/outdoor bar/club/pool where there are basically no rules as far as I can tell. Spontaneously feel like going for a swim? Hop in! Sex in the pool? Sure why not. Take a pee in the corner of the outdoor dance floor (ahem, Crissy)? That will be acceptable.

Gayman Wingman and I began the hunt. Looking back, the ridiculousness of our drunken (and probably creepy) prowling of the facility by literally doing laps around the place looking for hot brunette girls is overwhelming. I'm honestly impressed by my own persistence here for not just settling for a dance partner that was wearing a popped collar or plaid shorts. After about 3 laps, the insanity of what we were doing set in and I gave up and went back to my friends to have fun dancing with the group. Not even a full minute after I gave up and said, "Forget it Wingman, it's not that important" exactly what we had been looking for walked by. Gayman Wingmay excitedly tapped my shoulder and pointed to a pretty brunette girl wearing cute shoes, a trendy vest over a t-shirt, and a fedora. I had a great time for the rest of the night with this cute, girly, chick from New York (of course from New York), and in the greatest bait-and-switch of all time, she met up with me again in the morning wearing black high tops, a wife beater, hoodie over one shoulder, and a flat-brimmed backwards Yankees cap. Well played, Newyork. Well played. I have to say though, she could pull it off.

We all eventually left the club and went back to the cottage for the requisite drunken grilled cheese and to commence the death climb up to my sleeping quarters. I was staying in the loft portion of the cottage, and to get there I needed to scale an almost vertical ladder up to a slanted ceiling without either falling down to the bottom, or smashing my skull at the top.

Bad Decision:  Staying in a lofted sleeping area on a trip where the main goal is to not be sober.
Better Bad Decision:  Bringing a new friend up there with you to save your life should you need to pee in the middle of the night and end up missing the ladder.

Needless to say, I survived the night.
The next day I went wandering/shopping down the main street with Newyork and a few friends, and eventually found myself laying by a pool with a daiquiri in my hand, observing a handful of other now half-human friends trying not to die from alcohol withdrawals. Pretty much the most ideal (and only appropriate) way to end a 36 hour vacation in the land of the gays.

On my way back to the boat, I grabbed burrito and went to find a place along the dock to sit and eat it. There were tons of people sitting along the dock and I had to walk quite a ways down (and notably closer to the boarding gangway to the ferry) to find an open place to sit. The second I threw myself down on a bench some guy came over and started rudely yelling at me for cutting all the people in line. I'm sorry, people haphazardly sitting on a dock is now considered a line? So a verbal fight with a gay man commenced during which I yelled things like, "The seats are all the same!". "This is a TICKETED boat. I think you'll make it on.", and "I JUST WANT TO CONSUME MY BURRITO."

In summary:
At least 5 tropical drinks: Check.
At least one of them frozen: Check.
Interaction with a cute girl: Check.
Fight with someone: Check
2011 P-Town weekend: Success.

Life Lesson: The only truly acceptable place to party is within the vicinity of a pool. This is the key to a fab summer.

You're welcome.
-LSLP, Ash.