...that had popped up on one of my aimless tumbles through cyberspace to my facebook wall with the caption, "still so, so yummy" and the aforementioned *sigh*.

Innocent enough, right? 

OK, so I'm still pretty new to facebook.  I mean, I joined about the time my 65 year-old mother did, well behind her gaggle of fifty-and-sixty-something sisters.  And then mostly it was family for awhile, and then a flood of requests from grammar school classmates, many of whom I hardly remembered who likely hardly remembered me. 

There were even a few friend requests from people who had taunted, teased, or bullied me, and one from someone whose mother had asked ten-year-old me if I was a "fag" as she car-pooled me and her daughter and a couple of other kids from Sunday School to a birthday party.

The genius of the facebook is that it combines an earnest and quite natural desire to gather pieces of one's past into a kind of online menagerie with the bottom-line pursuit of more "friends" than your "friends" have.  When people complain about facebook's using them for profit, they're obviously missing the point.

What usually happens after the flurry of old "friends" best forgotten is new "friend" requests.  I am OK with making new "friends", it's the old ones that often baffle me.  I mean, frankly, except in very exceptional cases — the handsome gentleman I shared a cab with in a foreign capital who found me ten years later on facebook — if I'd wanted to keep in touch, I would have. 

I'm not averse to reconnecting, but I don't think I'm really very sentimental about the past, and when dwelling on it I prefer, for the most part, personal reveries to public reminiscences.  Partly this is because no two memories — even of a single incident — are the same.  It's the Rashōmon Effect. 

Admittedly, this can on occasion lead to an entertaining evening.  

But something is lost when the like happens on your facebook "wall", as I found when two old bunkmates from back in my days as an itinerate farm-hand started debating the topic of my alleged outing fifteen years ago on mine. 

For a couple months out of the year for two or three years we lived and worked side-by-side in an orchard in New Hampshire.  The social part of the scene was truly my very least favorite thing about it.  But I found the work itself edifying (I had been reading Anna Karenina and was crushing hard on Kostya at the time) and a means to an end — a life in Europe that I led all the rest of the year and which a few grand helped me lead in style.

I was young enough at the time to actively explore two parallel lives — the ascetic and the aesthete, Goldmund and Narcissus wrapped in one— one early to bed, early to rise down on the farm, the other fin de siecle cafes and late night liaisons. The ascetic suffered, socially at least, in order to pay the way for the party boy.  That is the way, after all.

So, one reason I went to Europe was for the sex.  Others were the sex and the sex and the sex.  Europe provides such a charming backdrop for sex.  The New England Orchard, um, surprisingly not so much.  At least not for me. 

But I did love the work. 

No, really.

It helped me not dissipate completely into the life of decadent abandon.  It brought me literally back down to earth, focused me, and gave a purpose to my exertions.   I liked rising at dawn on a crisp autumn day — and especially my last couple of seasons on the farm — daylight in the distance as I walked to the barn to start up the tractor and set out the bushel bins in glorious solitude.

As I said, the social life of the "bunkhouse" where the farmworkers stayed was not an attraction for me, as it was for many who bumbled in for the autumn harvest, spending their evenings in from the orchards in what to them was a bohemian milieu there.  Meanwhile I was in bed dreaming of the real Bohemia.

So my cherished memories of the orchard are of, well, the orchard.  Of the solitary dawns.  Of the quiet of the orchards after the day is done.  Of coming home with a sense of understanding in muscle and bone of what the day is for.  Not whatever human dramas, love and squalor, the "bunkhouse" generated.

One of which, apparently (I missed it) was my big bunkhouse outing!  The subject of the great debate on my facebook wall. 

Larry, the apparent architect of this outing, had, according to Larry, liberated me.  CSI-like, he had followed the elaborate trail of breadcrumbs leading to my closet: a stack of vintage Honchos on my bedstand, a tub of Crisco at the foot of my bed (hmm, what's he cooking with that?), a giant two-headed dildo that doubled as a hat rack, among other little clues.

With To Catch a Predator zeal, Larry had finally confronted me, I learned from my facebook wall, freeing me from being a victim of idle speculation around the bunkhouse.  Now (finally) the people would know! 

John was arguing the other side — on my facebook wall, mind you — calling Larry out for outing me. 

John would not have been the wiser about me had he not heard it through the grapevine, and he seemed to be saying he'd either rather not have known at all (fair enough) or had heard it from the horse's mouth and then used me as a wingman. 

Because, he explained: "gay dudes make the best wingmen." 

(I'm not sure this works as well in reverse.)

So Larry and John went back and forth about this for over three days with almost forty separate posts on my facebook wall, never once asking me if I gave a flying fuck.

While I guess I appreciate what an impact an outing can have, there was a lot more I was holding back than my sexuality — basically just about my whole inner life.  Not from everyone, mind you, just from folks I wasn't particularly interested in sharing with. 

How do you tell that to a "friend"?

Watching two guys fight over me for three days might have been pretty hot fifteen years ago.  Now I can't imagine for the life of me what all the fuss was about. 

"sigh*.