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Let’s pretend that we’re friends. Let’s pretend that we’ve been friends for nearly “X” years. Yes! It’s already been “X” years! OK, Friend. Let’s pretend that I’m endlessly desirable; come closer, closer, and closer, Face 2 Face with the End of the Road. Let’s pretend that it’s an affair, erotic, excessive, and consuming, but without those suffocating tentacles of mutual obliteration and effacement. Let’s pretend that we’ll never become bedfellows with the Powers that B. Let’s pretend that an encounter with difference might deteriorate the Obdurate Self, and birth a kaleidoscopic bodypolitic, an ethic around the intimate, and that an encounter with sameness will often take us no further than the boundary of flesh, Thin Skin of a Body.

Let’s pretend that I’m not sitting on a curb smoking cigarettes while I wait for the Couple to finish eating a meagre slice of cake. No Vacancy at the Table for Two. Had I not been invited to be Parasite to the Couple, I’d be elsewhere; I might still be sitting on a curb smoking cigarettes, but I wouldn’t be the One who Waits. 

July, 2009. I’d forgotten that, back in High School, a Friend and I used to play a game during those Nothing Days of Summer, both countless and numbered, which is to say, jobless, early afternoons in between any given mediocre year of schooling and the next, after we’d made our way downtown, the pilgrimage rife with giddiness, sweat, and spending cash, to the Cinéma Banque Scotia, or the Chapters, or the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Corporations, Corporations, wherein, iced latté in hand, back relaxed against the storefront of whichever Second Cup we’d stumbled into, we’d count how long we could hold eye contact with each passing stranger. It never lasted longer than a few seconds; as we’d come to learn, most strangers aren’t interested in having punctured that unspoken, spectral boundary of privacy that envelops most bodies in public. Well, we were aiming for mutual discomfort, I reckon, or to produce a momentary intensity, or a flight of intimacy that could be literalized as a pair of pulsing dashed lines, from eyeball to eyeball, or to enter into a scene of encounter without presuming an event. And, I didn’t quite know what “cruising” was, back then, holding only a vague, partial appreciation of an erotics of withholding, a pleasure in Looking, but Not Touching.

July, 2011. And, I’d forgotten that, around that time, back in High School, in hindsight, an enviously capacious age, hours and hours and hours to spare, another friend and I used to play a different game, another kind of public performance with other kinds of interdependencies between ourselves and other unwitting subjects, beginning with a sudden proposition, “Let’s follow that man with the striped jacket,” and waiting and waiting and waiting in the sweltering bus until “DING!” and before y'knew it, finding ourselves across town, walking along a service road toward a busted, preowned car dealership; months later, that one-shot parade toward nowhere becomes a Game We Play, as one suggests, usually out of boredom, “Let’s go following!” Well, it’s as close as we’d come, in those days, to becoming undone by another, for another, in a most dramatic, theatrical way; we’d call it, now, a pedagogy for navigating particular kinds of subjective positions within a particular infrastructural landscape, or a survey of particular bodied geographies, or being infatuated with the sweet stickiness of others, while inconvenienced by overpresence, and overidentification, nonetheless.

My chair is a Passive Top because it insists on staying still as I work, only squeaking quietly as I shift in place. But, sometimes I’ll turn the chair around when I’m tired of the usual posture. My couch is a Stubborn Top because I’m usually wrangled into the same, uncomfortable position whenever I sit down to rest. My bed is a Passive Bottom, it’s so incredibly passive, soft, too soft, some would say. But, my back hurts every morning. The window above my bed is a Total, Selfish Top, as it offers not much in the way of pleasure; poor view, poor ventilation. My closet is an Active Bottom, as are all closets, it seems. It cannot help but telegraph it’s own empathic receptivity, if not only because it’s door cannot stay shut. My table teeters on the fantasmatic division of a binaristic paradigm. My table was placed in storage for a brief period late last year, but returned recently with a fervour for multitudinous utility and a delicious versatility. My toilet is a Bottom. My bicycle is a Twink.

I grow tired, hot, sweaty day after hot, sweaty day, of flaccid representations of a GAY lifeworld, either because of Pornography or Instagram or Grindr or Whatever, knowing that, of course, I’m able to opt out of these particular image regimes, but that, for whatever reason, I don’t. I’m turned on, but not politically incited; aroused, but unstirred. Yet, I’m posting this Digitally Brutal Forum , both because it is hot, hot, hot, and because it seems to offer a kind of out. Let’s call it “Yelp, but for Sex in Public.” Not yet a relic of the past, it is, after all, still on the Internet, and, in any case, I’ve no interest in reinstating a digitally unmediated homosociality; kids, get back on your smartphones. And, tho it’s a forum for a GAY lifeworld, it doesn’t rub in the wrong way, I’d imagine, because there are no images, only trite remarks, a frequent “Heads Up!” for cops, and elaborate directions, like a laboured, pedal-by-pedal account of a pilgrimage to a wooded spot for cruising under a bridge in Montréal.

It’s a matter of infrastructure, as in, "The wooded area is to be developed in the coming year, with the construction of a new hospital.“ And, "Along the electric structures, follow the path to the bridge that leads to the Small Island.” And, “The mall is huge and almost empty. However, the washrooms are open and very active.” And, “Just follow the path. It’s cruisy all day.” And, “Not sure about the cruising; there are two stalls, four urinals and naturally, a camera.” And, “If you look at the back of the stall wall, you can see the reflection of the guy in the stall next to you through the cracks really well.” And, “Many of the trees and bushes have been cut down so there are not as many private places but it’s still a lot of fun.” And, “There’s lots of action at night, between the trees. Just be patient.” And, “After the whole remodelling/renovation, they made those bathrooms with locks, so the doors are locked and for employees only.” And, “The bridge is currently under reconstruction scheduled through at least December, 2018; future status as a cruisy area is unknown.” And, “Closed as there is construction going on.” And, so on, and so forth.

FIRST LINE [LESS THAN] 35 [BAR] [CAMERA] [EQUALS] [SPEECH BALLOON] 34 SECOND LINE ONLINE NINETEEN MINUTES AGO THIRD LINE LOOKING FOR MASC SINGLE GUYS 25-35 FOURTH LINE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN SOMETHING FIFTH LINE REGULAR AND/OR FRIENDSHIP, NOT HOOKUPS. SIXTH LINE PLS HAVE OR SEND A [CAMERA]. A FACE [CAMERA]. I SEVENTH LINE DON'T RESPOND TO TAPS NOR FACELESS EIGHTH LINE PROFILES.

FIRST LINE ALPHA TOP 4 [DOWNWARD ARROW] 52 SECOND LINE ONLINE NOW THIRD LINE I DON’T HOST. YOUR PLACE ONLY. FOURTH LINE ALPHA (8IN UNCUT) LOOKING FOR SUB CD FIFTH LINE TRANS OR GUY IF YOU’RE MY TYPE. I SIXTH LINE RESPECTFULLY CONTROL THE INTERACTION. SEVENTH LINE NOT VERSATILE. FWB A PLUS.

FIRST LINE FIT N FRIENDLY SECOND LINE ONLINE FIFTY EIGHT MINUTES AGO THIRD LINE FIT, BI. LOOKIN FOR A HOT FRIEND TO FOOL FOURTH LINE AROUND WITH. DOWN 2 SWAP PICS N NOT FIFTH LINE AFRAID OF A REAL CONVERSATION. START W/ A SIXTH LINE CLEAR PIC PLEASE! 

FIRST LINE DADDY JOHN SECOND LINE ONLINE TWENTY TWO MINUTES AGO THIRD LINE I WANT A BABY THAT CAN KEEP ME FOURTH LINE COMPANY AND DISTRACT ME, A BABY I CAN FIFTH LINE TRUST AND WILL TRUST ME TOO.

FIRST LINE READ PROFILE! SECOND LINE ONLINE THIRTY TWO MINUTES AGO THIRD LINE LOOKING FOR DATES, FRIENDS TO GO OUT AND FOURTH LINE TRAVEL. TRAVEL FOR WORK. LIKE DINNERS IN FIFTH LINE OR OUT LIKE CULTURE AND HISTORY AND SIXTH LINE CARS. MORE LOOKING FOR LTR. I LOVE SEVENTH LINE ASIANS. NOT INTO LONG CHATS, IN PERSON IS EIGHTH LINE BETTER. NO HOOK UPS!