Where Winter Has No Meaning
Just got back this evening from an incredible Atlantis cruise to Puerto Rico, St. Maartin, and Labadee, Hispaniola (aka "Haiti"), and I was overwhelmed by the fact that there are places on this earth where winter is irrelevant.

I'm tanned, burned, mellow and in heavy denial. Denial that I'll be returning to work on Tuesday after using Monday as my re-entry day. I'm also over-tired, over-danced, over-spent, over-socialized, over-baconed (which I thought was impossible) and under-hydrated.

The actual cruise itself was a 24/7 festival of meeting new and interesting/exciting people, and signs of a community continuing to divide itself. I suspect I'll be writing about the past week in the next few days, but I won't bore you with all the specifics of my day-to-day activities. That would be the equivalent of "Earl and Belinda's slides of their trip to Cancun." Instead, I'll try to present some observations on the gay community through the lens of a rarely-experienced gay microcosm: our ongoing worship of beauty's tyranny, the aging gay man's battle for self respect in spite of reality, the messages we sell ourselves while we ignore the messages we try to tell ourselves, and the secrets to stability while boogie-boarding one of those surfing pool things.