Rainy Days and Mondays...

Or is it Sundays?

Yes, it's true. Rainy Days and Sundays always get me down. When I was a child, my parents and I would go to Mass, go out to lunch and then come home. At that point the SF Chronicle would open and both of them would be immersed for hours. Now today, for me, that would be fine, but for a 9 year old, it just wouldn't do.

Being an only child, the only playmate I had was myself. After a few years I, quite frankly, got boring. I couldn't satisfy myself. As I looked around for other friends, they were all congested into their own family units playing with their brothers and sisters. I don't know why, but Sundays will always conjur "family" for me. My lack of it and my luck of it.

Later in life, (my 30's) I would find out that "Sunday" and "Family" would mean the Eagle SF's Afternoon Beer Bust. And what a bust it was. Being a pissy queen, I never, ever did the beer bust, preferring Bud in a bottle. Something about the smell of that nasty beer on everyone's breath was something to behold. And I swear, it must havee been fortified because most everyone was drunk out of their mind. While I may have been drunk, I never wanted to be messy. Unfortunately, I think I was way messier than I'll ever admit.

Some of the best times in my life were on the patio of the Eagle. I actually would like 1/3 of my cremains to be spread on the patio on a Sunday. Come to think of it, when I was in my early 20's, in Los Angeles, it was Greg's Blue Dot Lounge on Highland and "Sunday Church". The same sort of thing. Way more fun, way more drugs and ofcourse, way younger.

Someone said, "With AIDS, all the people that could actually verify that I was once cute and young are dead". That would be true for the crowd at Greg's. I doubt there is anyone left.

At the Eagle one day it crossed my mind that I was now one of those "hot" older guys I remember from my days at Greg's. Me at the ripe old age of 38 with such realizations. Amazing. But was I really "Hot"? I'll never know.

As I sit here on a rainy Sunday in my self-imposed solitary seclusion, I find I long to be ready-ing for a Sunday afternoon at the Eagle. Feeling good about myself again, feeling young again, feeling like I have family, feeling the warmth of the tequila going down my throat and later, most likely, the touch of someone's warm body against mine holding my tight. If only for a moment of make believe.