Today, the day after I whined about my rejection letters (four so far, not exactly the deluge) I got an acceptance. A magazine called The Iconoclast is going to publish one of my "Dear Henry" poems.

I whine about needing validation, and the universe orders me up an envelope full of it. That's efficient service, right there. I opened the envelope and did a little happy dance and everything. I'm a poet after all.

And I'm gonna quit whining now.

So, Bruce came to visit me last week. He got here quite late on Wednesday, which worked out well; I was able to spend Wednesday cleaning, bike riding, running vague preparatory errands and watching The Amazing Race.

When he got here, he gave me birthday presents. Or as we like to call them, pres-onts. I got a stuffed llama from The Emperor's New Groove ("Llama face...") and a hamster that sings Happy Birthday and dances. (I want you to know that Bruce insisted on waking me up on Thursday, Friday and Saturday by making the hamster sing his happy birthday song.)

He also got me a Kate Winslet CD. I didn't even know she HAD a CD! It's from a movie called The Christmas Carol and it's called "What If" and it is stuck in my head even now, and I've only listened to it a couple of times. There's a music video on the CD that is extremely random (a ghost maid! a clock! an animated clock! an animated maid! an animated ghost clock shaped like a maid!) but Kate looks gorgeous, so who cares?

Was there something else? I'm not sure if the travel-sized gay spray was part of the pres-ont, or if he just left it behind. Either way, I am now the proud owner of travel-sized gay spray. Equivalent to approximately four kimonos on the scale of gayness.

I don't think we did anything thrilling on Wednesday. It was late. We pretty much made the hamster sing a few times and then went to sleep.

On Thursday we got up at the crack of dawn, also known as noon. We are both morning people, as you can tell.

We went to the café down the street for breakfast-- Sydney and Tatum introduced me to this place when my sister et al. were in town, and the food is yummy. It's a nice alternative to that crap-fest known as Denny's.

I'm pretty sure it was at that point that we went wine shopping. Bruce didn't feel like going to wine country on this visit, so this was our big wine excursion, at BevMo (Beverages, And More!) the big wine (And More!) store across the street. They had a bottle of the Far Niente Dolce, behind lock and key of course. It's $65 a bottle, but holy lord, that stuff is heavenly. I bought the cheap knockoff version, and Bruce bought a whole bunch of other stuff.

After that, we decided to go for our first bike ride. As it turns out, we couldn't do the redwood ride I had envisioned, because Bruce doesn't have a mountain bike, he has a road bike. Well damn. We decided to ride across the Golden Gate bridge instead.

Bruce has one of those fancy schmancy road bikes that weighs about half a pound. He also has special bike shoes with hard flat soles and pedals that he clips his shoes onto. These things would make my life hell; I'd probably fall over every ten seconds.

We had to dodge a lot of pedestrians, since only one side of the bridge was open. Also, it was windy and butt cold. Biking across the bridge was fun, don't get me wrong, but we should have paid more attention to the signs-- the other side of the bridge (bikes only) was open by the time we made it back.

When we got back to the car, we had only gone about 4.5 miles. We tried to bike around the Presidio at the south end of the bridge, but me (and my bike) couldn't really handle the steep hills. I felt like a wuss, kind of, but it was fun.

After that, we drove into Chinatown and walked around for awhile before going to dinner. We shopped: I bought those silver stress balls, and a mini-bonsai tree kit, two kinds of dried mangos (one tastes like feet, the other does not), and "best peanuts in Chinatown" which taste like, well, peanuts. Bruce bought a buttload of candy.

We both headed for "the best restaurant in Chinatown" only to discover that we were talking about two different places, both on Kearny Street. He wanted to go to the one that everyone goes to; I voted for the hole-in-the-wall next door that only the locals go to. He won the argument, but with the caveat that next time we're going to my place.

The food was really good where we went, but they didn't have lemon chicken, which is my favorite. (Orange chicken or pineapple chicken would have been good too, but they didn't have those, either.) Over dinner, I got to hear more about his new boy. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that things work out, New Boy seems like a keeper.

After that, what else but porn!

We drove past an adult male strip club (which we immediately named Viva Las Gaygas) and decided to go see what it was all about. We had to get drunk first, because we would have felt too sleazy to go inside, otherwise. So we went to a dive bar down the street and drank, and drank, and drank, and played those quarter machines, and drank. (You could tell how drunk we were by the names we were putting in the high scores. First it was Mo Pie, then it was Moesha Pie, then it was Mffssss piyyyy....)

Sadly, when we got there, we found out it was a THIRTY DOLLAR cover charge. Man, that was just too much. I sort of wish we had paid it anyway, or at least tried to negotiate, because it would have been Bruce's first strip club, and I've never been to a male strip club before. (It isn't a Chippendale's type thing-- the guys give you lap dances and even ejaculate on stage. If nothing else, it would have been an interesting experience.)

We headed downstairs in the other direction, to the movie booths. I've been to a porn arcade once before, with Tim and Adele, way back in the day. This one was less sleazy (we still did our level best not to touch anything) but the porn was much gayer. Like forty five channels of gay porn you could surf through, ninety seconds for one dollar.

Want to experience it for yourself? I'll hide the text for the faint of heart. Here goes. Blowjob, blowjob, butt cheeks, blowjob, cock, anus close-up, blowjob, blowjob, cock, spanking, spanking the cock, blowjob, ass fucking, blowjob, cock, butt cheeks, spanking, whipping, spanking and whipping, blowjob, anus, anus, anus, money shot, anus, blowjob. Time's up.

Is that paragraph going to get me some interesting search hits or what? I might as well add Britney Spears and underage teenage sex weasels to really spice things up. Anyway, we tried to take pictures of each other with choice bits of porn, but the pictures didn't really come out. You can see us just fine, but you can't see the giant penises or whatever. So sad.