Conversations with Real People

12:27 AM – Sunday, October 13

I am sitting in my friend Bill’s Pool House in Sonoma, CA writing on my laptop after a long, fun day of interesting conversations.   Bill and I have been friends for eight years and every time I’m in the Bay Area I reach out to see what he’s up to.  This weekend, he told me he was having a bunch of guys up to his house in Sonoma and asked me if I wanted to come.  I headed out Saturday morning and was at the pool house by noon.   Bill was here with his friend Alex and eventually the house was full with an interesting group of characters.

We got into the hot tub at some point and the conversation turned to Shakespeare.  I think it started by talking about someone’s Dad’s fascination with the West Side Story soundtrack.  We were talking about how stories seemed to recycle.  Then this guy named Matt mentioned that he studied British Literature in college.  The conversations ran the gamut from Miley Cyrus to the relevance of companies like JC Penny and the recent firing of their CEO.

I go back to my favorite, Fran Lebowitz, who says in her documentary Public Speaking  that writers need to hang out with people to be inspired.  They need time to just talk about things, to get perspective and to just engage in conversation.  It’s inspiring. 

I thought a lot about that last week when I hung out with my friend Tim and his friends last week.  I blogged about it here:  http://creativityinrealtime.blogspot.com/2013/10/cowboys-and-kushner.html

And I thought a lot about it today.  I can do all of my work.  I can write and read plays and watch documentaries on Netflix to be inspired.   But what ties that all together is discussing what’s on my mind with other people.  Intellectual discourse.

I chatted with a really nice guy named Alfred, who was there in what seemed like a strange pairing with a younger guy who brought out two different pairs of Tom Ford glasses during the day.  Both guys claimed to be straight, but the hot young guy was dressed like a modern day James Dean in the right navy cardigan, the right white t-shirt and the right pair of Diesel jeans with red tie up Vans.  This look was well curated.  The oddness of the pairing aside, the conversation with Alfred went from talking about high end real estate in New York and how the super rich from other countries are buying up property in Manhattan to his struggles with sleep apnea. 

Then Matt and I talked about how mutual hate and fear of horror films.  How we both hate watching people get mutilated on film.   Poltergeist was fine because it was supernatural and less gory.  And the Scream films were okay because they were kind of meta and they were about horror films.  And they were funny.  But no to Saw.  My opposition to horror films started when I was seven and my Uncle took me and my brother and cousins and grandmother to see Friday the 13^th. 

I caught up with my friend Thomas about what was going on in our lives.  He had sunglasses on and apologized that I couldn’t see his eyes.  Then he told me about how he had worked in Haiti two years ago and that the people there didn’t trust you if you were wearing sunglasses because they felt like you were not letting them into seeing who you are.  It has made him sensitive about not showing his eyes to people ever since.

We had a conversation with Bill's friend Alex about his "back of the house" dating habits and whether or not his attraction to Latino men who wore jewelry and displayed machismo was purely aesthetic.

Bill and I caught up about the boyfriend’s life on tour.  We all ended up gossiping about the couple who had just been there with us, wanting to know what their relationship was.  I got a hug from Thomas who said he was so glad I came up for the weekend and that he wishes we were more in touch.  I honestly didn’t realize until today that he actually liked me, beyond being polite whenever we saw each other.  I’m not sure why I felt like he had been standoffish before.  But it felt good for us to have a few good moments at the party.

As the party winded down and we all came inside the house and separated into our own factions for either more conversation or for other fun nightly activities (I settled for intellectual discourse versus sexual intercourse), it kind of felt like The Big Chill or Love Valour Compassion:

A group of people—some friends, some acquaintances, some strangers—gather for a pool party on the last real night of summer at a vacation house in Sonoma.

I’d buy a ticket to that movie. 

It made me realize how much I miss that sort of interaction.  I have great friends who stimulate me often with what they say and what they do. 

My best friend Alanna and I are working on a sketch show idea right now and those conversations about the things we grew up watching completely inspire me creatively. 

My friend Susan and I talk about our future and she does tarot card readings for me and tells me about my life.  Those talks are often about business and about visualization.  It’s what got me started on the path of doing my running meditations.

But I realize that I need a group of intellectual, accomplished gay men who know about art and culture, care about politics and are informed, and care about each other deeply.  Yeah, I could write a play about it to get that feeling of care and friendship.  Or I could just try to find more people like that in LA.

I hope that’s not going to be as hard as it sounds.

POSTSCRIPT: The group and I are going for a run in the morning.  And we might be doing a boot camp together.  Mind-Body-Soul connection.  Get into it.