Loring Park Episode #15: We're Not All in the Mood For a Melody

I am that weird age where I am too old to be following random 19-year-olds on Twitter but young enough to snag myself a sugar daddy. Both are dangerous.

I went to LUSH twice in a row last week! LUSH is still my favorite gay bar and while I’m very happy to be in Loring Park, I miss being within walking distance of it. Chuck and Joey were both attending, and I felt bad that I didn’t get there until 12:30. I have a chronic inability to arrive at a social gathering before midnight. It doesn’t matter what time I start to get ready. I have to shave, and take an hour-long shower, and put my make-up on, then remove my make-up because it doesn’t look right, then re-apply, then change my outfit three times. I think I have Gay OCD.

Joey moved in with muscle gays in the suburbs, and I have not met them yet but one of them I often see at the clubs and the other one I Facebook-creeped out of boredom. I told Joey that if I am just randomly in his suburb (that I don’t think I’ve ever been to in my life, truthfully), I just might need to borrow something like vodka or a cup of sugar or an orgasm. I went to the bathroom and stood at the mirror next to someone who had to be a model, and then Star Quarterback came out of the stall with four other dudes, and he was wearing a zip-up sweater and looked dreamy. My life is a joke.

At the end of the night, Chuck and I stood by the fire and somehow we ended up in conversation with a boy who used to work coat check at The Saloon. You know I’m not one to be overdramatic or use exaggerated statements, so you’ll have to trust me when I opine that he was THE CUTEST BOY EVER. He was from South Dakota and that meant that he didn’t know that he was beautiful. We talked about the weather, which means I must have wowed him.

“I heard you met a boy last night,” Liam texted me the next morning.

“Not like that,” I said. “We only talked about the weather.”

“I know his last name,” Liam said. Then I Facebook-creeped and found out he has a boyfriend. Cue the music they play when people lose on The Price is Right.

On Tanning

I'm having an identity crisis. For the past week or so, I have been obsessed with the idea of tanning.

And most people would decide, instincitvely, to go to the tanning booth or not. But I am Jakey, and therefore I have to internalize all of this into something much greater.

I have always been pale. I knew this as a child, when I was fixated on the olive skin of a Black Irish classmate named Danny (I would call him "Tanny" as a nickname), and when I was at a pool party for a friend's birthday and he, at age nine, told me "Go in the sun, Jacob! You're white as a sheet!"



I signed up for a gym recently (I am paying way too much for personal training services, which means I won't move out of my parents' house until I'm 30, but I will get that shit tight). I am enjoying the results I am getting, but maybe I will never be satisfied. Everytime I see my arms in the giant mirrors I cringe at how pasty I am compared to everyone else.



Alas, here is where a moral dilemma comes into play. I was friends with a douchebag once. He was in the famousphere of Hollywood, where apperance is everything, and I understand that. He was also a gay man living in a world of masculine ideals and, in this world, you had to be a certain way to be happy. "If you want to ever make it to California," he once told me, "You have to be tan and buff."




"KISS MY SKINNY WHITE ASS!", I wanted to say. "I WILL NEVER BE TAN AND BUFF AND I AM FINE WITH THAT!"

And I'm not fine with that, but if I do go tanning, then am I making him right, by subscribing to this beauty myth? And what if I do it wrong and show up at work looking like an oompa-loompa? It all greatly confuses me.