Mojitos done me in.

Wednesday:
No drinking allowed!!! Must detox... So spend practically whole day in bed, with book. Eating a bit, but damn... alcohol is giving me a tummy. So sit-ups it is. Then field phone calls. One of them drives me into a state of fury so sharp and cutting I almost immediately hang up the phone. Unfortunately, my reaction is to grab a bottle of beer from the fridge. I drink it. Then I cry. My life is falling to pieces. I have to stop smoking, drinking, and wasting my time on television. I need to get a job, finish writing, and generally get my life in shipshape order.

Then I call Alon. I offer to make him dinner, which is fried chicken liver salad... but he politely turns it down and offers to take me to Julie's Cuban instead. So, half an hour later, I'm at a table opposite my first gay boyfriend. He's so Alon, so nice, so funny... so North York. It takes a short time but we drift back into the same jokes. It's like the story of this trip so far... drifting back into old jokes. I hope I don't have some old joke involving money coming up.

We drink mojitos, so much for my non-alcohol day, and eat Rellena (one giant deep fried potato ball stuffed with ground beef), shrimp and avocado salad, and calamari. This is the standard battered deep fried calamari, and it's better than yesterday's tempura sister. The shrimps are garlicky and tender and the avocado at the right point of maturity, all dressed with lime juice. The Rellena is nice... a bit expensive for basically a fistful of mash potatoes and ground beef. Dessert is a key-lime coconut pie.

Over dinner Alon tells me about his new bf, this stunning 19-year old Italian stallion from Sudbury, on getting cheated on, on Danilo's threesome thursdays, and the other sordid bed-swapping stories from the gay-art community in Toronto. I sit back and wonder how I've missed out for so long, how lousy an emailer he is, and the priviledge of having old friendships intact.