September 30, 2002

I’m not quite sure how to tell the story I’m about to tell. In fact, I’m not at all sure I should be telling it in the first place. In any case, please forgive its length.

In an attempt to drown my sorrows (W.F., for example, has failed to call me this week as he promised), I decided to throw myself back into the life of the mind. I briefly considered becoming a monk and moving to a medieval castle to illustrate manuscripts, but then it occurred to me that the whole Jewish thing would probably get in the way.

Plus, there’s an orgy scheduled for Thursday night, and I don’t want to miss it.

So I did the next best thing, which in this case was to go out and buy a textbook on Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Put this part of the story on hold for a moment and move with me to the present day. My friend D.R. and I spent this evening at Drip. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Drip is a cafe on 84th and Amsterdam that sells delicious Oreo milkshakes and has books full of personal ads.) There are four books of Men 4 Men ads, in which I have found exactly one ad to which I want to reply. But in order to reply to an ad, you have to leave one yourself. So D.R. and I sat there, trying to write an ad for me based on what we thought this one guy (about whom we knew nothing except what he put in his ad) would like.

The thing is, his ad is extraordinary. It has taken D.R. and me three visits to Drip to write an ad for me that’s at the level of this guy’s.

By the end of this go-round, we’d come up with answers to all the questions except “looking for.” Everything we thought of was either inferior to his answer or already in my ad somewhere else.

So we decided to answer in hieroglyphs.

I have spent the last two hours in my kitchen (the only room in my apartment with decent light) poring over An Egyptian Grammar trying to figure out how to say “somebody who’s cute, smart, funny, compassionate, stimulating, and a top” in Middle Egyptian.

I think I have finally figured it out.

Now I just have to practice drawing the damn things so it doesn’t look as if they were done by a developmentally disabled child.

The Middle Egyptian is, as far as I can tell, grammatically correct, though probably stylistically and idiomatically atrocious. A literal translation would read “man beautiful clever, he brings to me amusement, he cries out for justice, he causes to rejoice my spirit.”

“And a top” will have to be in English. I’m sure the Egyptians did that sort of thing, but they don’t seem to have carved it on their funerary architecture.

Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to I'm not quite sure how

  1. D.R. says:

    For the record, we went with the hieroglyphs because everyone answering a personal ad will represent themselves as cute, smart, funny, compassionate, and stimulating; those words will not, so to speak, separate the wheat from the chaff, so why must they be legible to the population at large? It is only in the area of sexual positioning that specifics begin to come to light.

    Reply
  2. No Answers says:

    How many people do you know are in a relationship that you actually admire? I can answer that by saying NONE. Sad but true. Most couples I know (hetero only I’m sorry to say) are mostly either boring or pathetic. Am I cynical? Perhaps I am but at least when I have sex it’s of the Penthouse Forum variety. I’ve never been willing to sacrifice that for security. Am I pathetic? Probably.

    Reply
  3. Well, I have to admit, hetero relationships are rather boring. 😀
    One of my readers sent me the link to your blog and I was very happy to find another gay-ish site for me to read.
    That protest over breakfast first dress later, made me die laughing! DIE LAUGHING! I am dead.
    Thanks a lot man. Be back soon.

    Reply
  4. Dino says:

    I like this blog! What an active sex life! I’m staying in a hotel right now and can’t pick up a stud to have wild sex with in my room. Dialling someone else’s room number with the opening line “Wanna have sex?” is so lame. Any advise?
    Btw, where can I get a copy of your porn video?

    Reply
  5. Pingback: The Search for Love in Manhattan

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *