80 HIP HOP FASHION

(012/365)

It's way too late to be doing this...

And, I'm drunk.

The benefit was tonight.
It was fun! But, definitely not what I was expecting.
Picture a warehouse, all decked out in white, with contrasting themes of fire and ice. Half naked, painted models, selling raffle tickets for fantastically expensive gift baskets, liquor being poured through ornately carved ice sculptures, and a conglomeration of rich gays, dressed to the nines in their most expensive casual outfits (for, don't forget, this is south Florida).

I milled about, had my two free cocktails, picked at the finger food, and stalked the area where people could bid on my piece. I met some of my boss' friends, and their friends, but after a while, I realized I was bored.

And no one was bidding on my photo.

It was right after the belly-dancer with the flaming sword balanced on her head decided she was going to climb a giant piece of fabric to a ring suspended from the warehouse ceiling, and begin spinning wildly around, that I realized, the reason I was bored was because everyone here KNEW EACH OTHER!

I was in a room full of gay men that had been traveling in the same circle for the past umpteen years. A class of elite homos, all between the ages of 35-60, that have seen each other out, rubbed elbows, swapped hand jobs, and generally gotten comfortable with the repetitiveness of each others presence.

I knew no one. And was in the age minority.
I looked around me, to all the other mid-twenty-year-olds, each attached to their respective sugar daddy, and realized they too were equally lost...alcohol their only salvation.

I'd ran out of drink tickets.....
And drinks were expensive.....
And I didn't come with a sugar daddy.....

Plus, no one was bidding on my photo.

Two bids by the time I left.....
I don't want to talk about it.

Hence the reason I'm drunk.
I dove into the beer when I got home.
And here it is, almost 3am, and I can't believe I even had it in me to take a 365day shot, much less fuck with it, post it, and write....well, whatever the hell I just wrote....

Yeah.....
I'ma fuck this 365 thing up....

I love the American West. My love of the west came relatively late in life. Even though I was raised in a family of travelers..check that…a family hooked on road trips, all of our travels were east of the Mississippi. We traveled all over the south and in particular Florida. To this day, the middle Keys in Florida still own my heart. It wasn’t until I took a job that sent me to southern California for training that I crossed over the plains and into the west. I was 38 years old at the time.

Since that time I have gone back several times for vacations and business. As a boy raised in the Great Lakes region I find myself damn near frozen by the western sky and the vistas. Once, while driving along U.S. 6 in Utah, I encountered a stretch of open road. I dropped out of a small cropping of mountains into a desert salt flat. On the horizon was another cropping of mountains. The scale was incredible. I stopped the car to take it all in. Getting back in the car I began wonder about the distance of the horizon. I set the trip odometer to zero and hit the gas on that long flat road. When I reached the other side the odometer read 45 miles. Along the way I had old Waylon playing on the CD player. Waylon wistfully sang Dee Moeller’s words:

“The land where I travel once fashion with beauty now stands with scars on her face
The wide open spaces are closing in quickly from the ways of the whole human race
And it's not that I blame them for claiming her bounty
I just wish they're takin' it slow
Cause where has a slow movin' once quick draw outlaw got to go
Where has a slow movin' once quick draw outlaw got to go”- Dee Moeller