Allow me to introduce myself

Friday afternoon, the wind kicked up along Commercial Street, and the rainbow, bear, and breast cancer flags blew in a fierce easterly pattern. The men of Provincetown’s Bear Week sauntered up the street toward the Boatslip’s tea dance, the muscle-bound bodybuilders with their barbed wire bicep tattoos, army boots, and tit clamps and the chubbettes in their assless leather pants and pink sparkle vests.

I stood on the steps of the post office. I’d just mailed off thirty postcards to friends and family, as I’ve done for more than twenty years on vacations. I wonder if any of them know that I always write exactly the same thing on each postcard – except, of course, for the address and the salutation. And some people rate “Love, Jim” while others, not yet well known, rate only “Fondly.” I don’t think they know this. But now you do.

Last time I’d come to Provincetown, I was forty and just like any of the boys, engaged in a twenty-four hour quest for sex, sex, sex with stranger, stranger, stranger. But that was ten years ago and, safely ensconced in a same-sex marriage with another fifty year old, I found the whole routine rather tiresome. I sighed and looked up at the sky, wishing I’d stayed back at the house to read my book (“The 10 Best Anxiety Management Techniques”) under a tree with Peter and James, my Philadelphia friends. I don’t think my friends knew I’d reached the point in my life when I’d rather read a book than cruise for random sex. I don’t think they knew that I was getting close to preferring a good solid bowel movement to random sex. But now you do.

So I gave myself into the luxury of walking back toward the rental house, turning my back to the boys on their way to the Boatslip, telling myself that I had an as-happy-as-possible marriage, my great-grandparents’ crystal chandelier in the dining room, a financial adviser who smiled when he saw me, and both parents in nursing homes. But I couldn’t control that damned anxiety (still on Chapter One of that anxiety book), and that wind was powerful fierce.

Last day in Provincetown, I’d be flying across Cape Cod in one of those puddle jumpers in just fifteen hours. And with this wind, we’d be bouncing from cloud to cloud, probably crashing into the water like John F. Kennedy Jr. And I wouldn’t even get to do my Daily Write session. Major bummer, if the plane crashed. Most people don’t know I go crazy with turbulence. But now you do.