WAY TO GO OHIO

let's say his name is kaylon. let's say that's his name because it is, and because i'd say that i doubt i would have come up with it on my own. and let's say that i went on a date with him, because i did, and that was because he'd asked me if i wanted to get a drink with him and given me his phone number within ten or so lines of opening a chat with me, which i found refreshing...or intriguing...or something that was charmingly enough out of the ordinary to pique my interest. also, he'd sent me a shirtless picture of himself immediately after his salutation and his compliment on my glasses, and his blurry torso (or whosever it was -- because i hadn't asked for any other pictures, and his profile picture was more of the same) wasn't bad. so i started exchanging texts with an idea that i'd conjured around a blurry picture of a not at all bad torso who lived near my friend's place in olde towne east. let's say his name is kaylon, because i'd say that there aren't any innocent to protect.

we made plans. ...and i showed up to them on time. and when he called, after almost an hour of my sitting alone with my beer next to the fire pit on the patio had passed, i told him that i was going to finish my drink and leave. that, no, he shouldn't come. did i think that he'd stood me up? i didn't care. and i told him that i was sure he had an explanation. but the truth was that i was annoyed, and i didn't think that a date with him was going to go very well after an hour of my stewing in my mounting annoyance, an hour that ended in an even more annoyingly stammering phone call (although i'm only telling that last bit just now). but he still wanted to come, he said, and he hoped that i would still be there; and i told that he probably shouldn't, but that i wasn't going to down the rest of my beer and run out of the tavern just to avoid him.

so he showed up. and i, i was texting my friend to tell her that i should already have ditched the date. and i motioned to him with my finger that i was busy. i should have left for the first time after he started arguing with me about not having called when i arrived. i'd sent him a text to tell him that i was on the patio, i told him, but if we were going to argue etiquette, i said, then i'd argue that making plans with someone for a specific time at a specific place means that you should show up there and then without having to be called. really. luckily, ben saved us from having to argue any further.

let's call him ben because that's his name, and he works across the street at yellow brick pizza. he'd been sitting by himself next to the fire pit and had asked if he could join our table. i'd told him that we were navigating a crisis, and he'd said that in that case then he should definitely help us and had pulled over a chair. after introducing himself, kaylon jumped on the opportunity to say (to ben) that he was a pastry chef and that people should forgive him for falling asleep and missing appointments because he had to be awake so early for work. i was, of course, enraptured by the charm of his passive aggression. then ben introduced himself to me and asked about the crisis, and i told him that things had already started to improve with his company and that i was so excited for what was about to happen that i wished i could be live blogging the progress of the resolution. he didn't seem to gather the reality of my sincerity -- and neither kaylon my sarcasm.

oh well. because ben had already started telling the story of his cast. he'd been at a big pagan festival in the woods. a lady had been giving him a hand job, then right as she whispered in his ear that she was queer she got scared away by a bear...and ben woke up with a broken foot. then he asked what we were up to, and i ruined it for myself by telling him that we were on a painfully awkward date, but that he had gone further than i could explain to better the situation. that's when he apologized and excused himself, and i regret not having followed suit.

kaylon said that maybe he could be better informed but that he wasn't political. (and he certainly was not 5'8".) so i had said that maybe it was better we changed the subject. i liked the place, obviously -- and i liked yellow brick across the street. but there were better ways to go about revitalizing a neighborhood than just clearing it out, moving higher rents in and installing retail and restaurants mimeographed off the coasts. but, he insisted, sometimes a city just had to do what it had to do. to make a neighborhood "nice." because did i know that this was once the nice part of town? and having lived there all of a year or so, he could tell me what the problems were. he didn't want to stereotype, he said, "but i think we both know what race it is." i suspected that it might be ours. and after turning away to bite my right shoulder for fifteen or twenty seconds, i stayed. there wasn't going to be much gotten from conversation, but i wanted to try for a clearer look at that torso. and as i felt absolutely compelled to confess to everyone i met the next morning, i subjugated my dignity to my dick, which ultimately just suffered more awkward ignominy before eventually taking its cold shower in the thunderstorm that broke as i finally found my way to walking away, completely ungratified. no innocent to protect.

way to go ohio. i still haven't read that article from the sunday magazine (perhaps in part because of an avoidance mechanism engendered by the city pictured on the cover), but apparently the state is doing relatively well...macroeconomically speaking. and it would be problematic to conflate the state of the state with the state of the city of columbus. by all appearances, however, the latter isn't doing so bad either. macroeconomically speaking. and people do seem to be proud of their city...and all the more so the more that the city does what the rest of them have done. but columbus doesn't seem interested at all in developing an indigenous movement of its own. late hipster irony is still coming into its day here, and that might actually be a good thing for the praise singers: an insular socius that nonetheless derives all of its cultural inspiration from the outside is easily rationalized deterministically. relatively well off, delightedly provincial, fashion neutral and socially conservative with an overt touch of latent racism. ladies and gentlemen, a portrait of the swing vote (shot, of course, using instagram).

on the side of a building at 88 east broad street, there's a sentence forming. "columbus never came here, but when the city sleeps, what our dreamers discover," it's started. and there's been a series of contests for residents to choose the words to follow the original five, which went up one by one beginning in the winter. the project is part of a larger one called "finding time," which was planned for downtown for 2012 as part of the celebrations for the city's bicentennial. i've no idea what the people of columbus discover when they dream. but it would appear that they need some help saying so themselves. and what columbus is being helped to say about itself couldn't have been better announced from over that (perfectly characteristic) downtown parking lot: the artist who conceived and is judging the project is in brooklyn. back to the blurry torsos.