Rouging Your Eye-Bags and All That

Vacation has been kicking into high gear, in that I find myself inordinately social, almost like I was back in Logan Circle. I'm darkening everyone's doorsteps, and striking up conversations with all sorts of third people here and there. But I'm also realizing that my life with Vini is very self-affirming to an almost delusional degree. Now that he's away, it's like the tide rolling out to reveal the garbage-strewn beach, or flicking on the lights to reveal the scurrying cockroaches.

It's been more than a year since I was a nominally single social gadabout. And while back in Logan, the usual topics tended to be parties, sex gossip, vacation plans and witty flirtations, the topics have shifted decisively towards comparing notes on our husbands, homemaking tips, dieting and plastic surgery.

I'm really and truly officially middle-aged.

But hey, I'm also a gay man. So this basically means I'm just entering a different stage of the relatively stable trajectory of a gay man's life, which has endless silver linings to every twist and turn. I tried to do that nutty clubbing stuff this week and found myself physically challenged to my absolute limits after one night of it. And Tuesday night's follies also threw me off my regular routine so much (my fairly fixed schedule of six small meals, along with my every-weekday workouts and going to bed at a decent hour) that I literally passed out mid-day on Wednesday. I almost passed out in the gym before that.

So, my body and everything about the course of nature has forced me to realize I've pupated into gay middle age and that I'd be better off accepting it rather than desperately hanging onto the skin I've just sloughed off. (Not a good look on anyone, ladies.)

Getting back to a semblance of a routine, I went to Gourmet last night (short for Director's Gourmet, but alas we all love to gayspeak) with Junior and drank only Diet Pepsi and water, and we talked about the men in our lives and our other middle-aged friends and their health issues, old boyfriends-of-yore stories, where-were-you-when flashbacks over 70s songs that the DJ played, and the latest news on Brazilian plastic surgery miracles involving collagen and eye bags. Scanning around the bar I could see we were in our element, and was also reminded that there are lots of hot young-middle-aged gay men, and all of them are hot precisely because they embrace being young-middle-aged and don't play the sad Dina Lohan game of denial.

We left around 1am, and I popped into the 24-hour market on Oscar Freire to do my grocery shopping on the way home. It had the usual scattering of people - the stoned couple buying munchies, the odd furtive youth buying condoms, the bitter single woman gripping a basket containing a frozen dinner, a box of tampons and a bottle of vodka.

As I was putting groceries away in my kitchen, Clancy did his usual sleepy-faced kitchen drive-by, popping his head into the doorway wondering if I'd brought him any treats, and seeing none, shuffling back to bed. It was a nice moment. It reminded me so much of life in Logan Circle, but it also had that very certain sense of being just slightly aged in wood and far away. I live in São Paulo now -- definitively. And I'm a married man in his early 40s. And while I will no doubt go right back to my usual routine once Vini is home and vacation ends, I can also still dance a soft shoe to various old tunes of previous stages of life with relative ease and grace.

P.S. -- Speaking of Clancy, I stumbled across this item this morning and I must say again: dogs, is there anything they can't do??