I don't know if it's the thawing of the earth — the stirrings of life just below the surface — the smell of lust and rot again — but the last couple of days I feel that something has awakened in me.  And I mean with a jolt. 

I was sitting at Espresso Royale on Gainsborough Street with my friend Steve the other day sipping a chai latte and I swear every boy that came through the door was delicious in a different way.  And demanded our immediate attention.


This, after at least four months of grayness and monotony where everything and everyone was meh.

The suddenness and soonness of it all is a shock to the system.  Every year lately when it — it being it — goes away, I assume it's gone for good.  And I have to say, I don't really miss it when it's gone, any more than a dog misses someone incessantly blowing a dog whistle in its ear. 

Sexual attraction happens on a certain frequency.  As you age maybe your range — both transmitting and receiving — narrows a bit.  It's subtle enough over the course of time that it's seldom felt as a lack.  And because it actually frees your attention for other things which you're more capable of appreciating with age, life compensates you.

Or something.

Yeah, whatever.  I don't know.  Desire is not a pleasant emotion, it's a painful one.  And the persistence of thirst long after any reasonable possibility of satisfactorily slaking it moves it into the realm of cruelty. 

At this point it is physically painful for me to people-watch.  Beauty, which when I am being reasonable I can appreciate, now feels like an affront, an assault.

And it took me completely by surprise.  Actually in the shower at the Y the other day (go figure).  I was done with my workout and was standing under the shower in the shower room in the grayness of an ordinary winter day when, Oh my God, the most gorgeous creature I had ever seen ambled in without ceremony, like he wasn't God's gift, effortlessly radiating warmth and light, to quickly cool off across from me before heading back to the sauna.  At which point everyone else in the shower room was off like a shot — PaCHOOM! — after him.

Not me.  I've still got my dignity.  I mean technically it's not even spring yet.  I still have — what? — a week, right?

No, I didn't chase after him like the other twelve queens who'd been waiting for hours on end, all pruned up under the showers, for a shot at glory. 

But for two solid days after, that half-minute is all I thought about, running it over and over in my head like a reel from a blue movie from the'70s.  As if I don't have a universe of porn at my fingertips.  When was the last time I actually fantasized about a real live guy?

I know it can't be that the city has been space-invaded overnight by a race of impossibly gorgeous boys and girls.  No, it's just the demon of desire with his damn dog whistle, back to his old tricks.