max in beantown

Hey folks,

When last we spoke, I was in Ohio, having a great community-youth-organizing adventure that ended in crushing defeat. Since then, I went back to DC for two days, go on a plane, and arrived in Boston - about two hours after I’d planned, but ya know.

I drove down that night to Cape Cod, Brewster, to be specific, where I plonked down at a motel at 2am. The next day was my friends Derek and Patrick’s wedding, one of the best weddings I’ve been to. Not that I’m a big wedding-goer, and my pal Mary & Catherine’s wedding in Louisville a month ago was also lovely.

Here I was on the Cape, at a Big Gay Wedding. Everything was really sweet - Derek and Patrick and their Best People in tuxes, I felt quite underdressed. But before the wedding I got a chance to check out the town of Brewster, which was really charming, and not in a “I’m supposed to be charming to you, I’m a tourist town” sort of way. Having grown up in tourist towns, I’m quite sensitive to the dynamics of being obliged to cater to people with more money than, say, everyone in your town.

As I was driving to find the one advertised “vegetarian-friendly” dining establishment in Brewster, I passed a sign - actually, several signs linked to each other, which said:
“Herbs
Crystals - stones
Espresso
internet”

It was all I could do not to screech the car to a halt. Instead I made my way to the sandwich shop, ate a lovely Portobello mushroom on ciabatta, drank a Nantucket juice, and wondered whether there really was a company in Nantucket or whether it’s all a marketing campaign, and contemplated asking a local and set off to explore Herbs - Crystals - Espresso - Internet.

The gravel driveway made it look like it was two buildings, but sure enough, it was your one-stop-recentering & connecting shop. I wandered in and was greeted by a nice young woman who looked like a variety of nice young women I’ve met in such establishments in California, but here we were in Cape Cod. She directed me to an ethernet cable and there I was, checking my email in a sort of undeveloped area of the shop with a dusty copy machine and a coffeetable.

A friendly older woman with short hair was chatting with the store worker about politics, and I couldn’t help but join in. “I was in Ohio on Tuesday” I said emphatically, after hearing them bemoan the outcome. Not to be a human cliché, but being in an herb-crystal-espresso bar made me relaxed in the first place, but being in an explicitly Lefty one was a tiny and weird piece of heaven. My homesickness waned. We talked a while, while I racked up .15-a-minute charges for my web-browsing. But my favorite part was that totally unremarkable-looking middle-class older white Cape Cod folks kept wandering into the store, purchasing this or that herbal concoction, which the young woman promptly whipped up from the many shelves of herb-jars, all while we were talking politics. I had to make a bee-line fore the wedding across the street, so I went to settle up and noticed that nestled among the crystallized ginger, stone-bead-bracelets and whatnot, were copies of “A People’s History of the United States." How about that? Can’t beat it.

After the wedding, we late-night revelers made the intrepid journey to Provincetown. It was my first time in P-Town, I’d only heard references and seen panels about it from Dykes to Watch Out For. I wasn’t really sure I’d ever go there, I have such little occassion to be in Boston and have access to a car and three hours both ways to kill. We went to a dance club and I hung around with the fellas for a while, and called it a night within two hours. There were definitely some cute guys, but for the most part people either danced or stood around and watched people dancing. It was a little reminiscent of junior high school. I’ll definitely give P-Town another shot, during the summer, though.

This morning, however, I woke up with exactly enough time to make the 11:00 check-out, swing by my new favorite Brewster, MA internet spot, go to the whole foods store that I’d been tipped off to by the boys, and make my way to a State Park for a few hours of not working. Since I took this job, there have not been so many of the not-working hours. While I was enjoying a moment of nature-filled solitude by a lake, I got a cell phone call - ironically, my reception was better by a secluded lake than in my hotel room - that I would have a place to stay for the next few days. Thank you, Jackie Downing! So I made my way two hours north to a raucus queer kick-ball game already in progress, and the rest is history.

I soon discovered that one of the folks I was supposed to be meeting with while I was here is the room-mate of my Boston host. Small world, indeed!

OK, to bed with me.