DRINKING THE KOOL-AID…OR BATHING IN IT

Not as far back as childhood. In Disney World, I had my picture taken 

with Minnie Mouse. It's part of my father's collection of slides, 

never to turn up again. As you can see, finally meeting 

Pluto in Disneyland was one of life's milestones.

I was born in Hamilton, Ontario and grew up there until the age of thirteen. Situated on Lake Ontario, the city was considered part of the “banana belt” in the southwestern portion of the province since we got less snow than places like Buffalo, New York which was sixty-five miles away on Lake Erie. Still, the predominant Ontario mindset was to book vacation time during winter to head south, most commonly to Florida. Sun! Beaches! Pluto and Goofy! 

 

Every March, my family loaded up the station wagon and headed for cities like Sarasota and Fort Myers on the Gulf Coast. These were excruciatingly long trips for a kid. How many times did my brother, sister or I ask, “How much longer?” or more naively, “Are we there yet?” 

 

My parents learned the best way to make the trek tolerable was to set me up in “the very back,” in the section behind the rear seat where two little seats popped up, facing one another. Luggage and coolers were stacked between my spot and the rear seat where my siblings sat. This reduced my opportunities to pester everyone which I’d discovered was a highly entertaining way to pass the time. Every time my brother or sister shrieked my name, I felt deeply rewarded. 

 

With me being barricaded away, I had to find less interactive entertainment. Books seemed like an ominous undertaking, too long, too many extended descriptions about kitchens and pond algae. Every time we pulled into a rest area, I stocked up on tourist maps and pamphlets. I grabbed one of everything, a boy of indiscriminating taste. (Has that changed?) My father’s driving itinerary was always ambitious so there was no chance we’d stop at the ghost town in Findlay, Ohio or a Kentucky ventriloquist museum, but I could read about these spots, gaze at the photos and count the number of exclamations that dotted the descriptions of things to do there. Oh! What! Fun! It was more interesting than reading about what a fictional character name Albert noticed in Aunt Mildred’s mason jars. (Always berry preserves, never fingers suspended in formaldehyde.)

 

My pamphlet collection grew exponentially as the drive dragged on, each place overhyped to such a degree that I wondered if there were any standards for allowing a roadside stop to declare itself “WORLD FAMOUS!” How does a small chain in Florida gain such renown for plopping sauerkraut on a hotdog? Did people in Australia really talk about it? In Turkey? (As an eight-year-old, I thought a lot about a country named after a bird stuffed with cornbread.)

 

One pamphlet-harkening destination in northeastern Florida randomly popped in my mind again this past week, an attraction in the town of Saint Augustine, billed as “the nation’s oldest city.” I don’t know if the Medieval Torture Museum, the Oldest Wooden School House or St. Augustine Shipwreck Museum existed way back in my days of being barricaded. What piqued my interest then, and does so exponentially more now, is Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth. There was no picture of this place, but I imagined something stately, one of those garden features but supersized with carvings of flying fish and lions and a long line of people waiting to drink from it as others jumped in and splashed about, their wrinkled skin becoming smooth, hair growing back on aging men’s scalps, none of it gray or white. This was why so many seniors flocked to Florida! I couldn’t understand why my grandparents, who stayed six months every year in a mobile home farther south in Lakeland, returned every April looking more like Jed Clampett or even Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies, not having transformed into Elly May or Jethro. Wrong priorities was all I could come up with.

 

At eight, the Fountain of Youth wasn’t a draw. I didn’t want to look four again, with grownups plopping back on a tricycle and clapping as I reverted to assembling ten-piece puzzles of fruit. Still, I knew I’d head to St. Augustine and the Fountain of Youth when the time seemed right. And, by golly, the time is now. Let me splash in it, swim, snorkel, scuba dive, float, drink from it and gargle with it. So long saggy bits! Begone, Santa beard! Vamoose, age spots! Hello again, boyish skin…without, fingers crossed, the accompanying zits. 

 

If only I still had an eight-year-old’s imagination…and gullibility. 

 

Like most of us looking at middle age in the rearview mirror—hell, that period’s long out of frame—I’m facing a comeuppance every time I glimpse any part of me in a mirror. Certain lyrics from Neil Young have new meaning as they pop into my head, like a most unwanted earworm: 

Old man, look at my life,

I’m a lot like you.

God lord, it doesn’t help that I’m conjuring up a song that was released fifty-one years ago. My only other pop culture reference thus far in this post is a TV show that’s even older. Why can’t I come up with a way to weave in TikTok, Doja Cat and some new series on a streaming channel that I refuse to pay for because I grew up in a time when watching The Carol Burnett Show and The Waltons was free? (I canceled Netflix after finishing all of Grace and Frankie.)

 

I’m at that awkward stage where I haven’t yet surrendered to complete irrelevance and dinners at three in the afternoon. I consider it a small victory that AARP, which had been popping up in my spam email folder during COVID, The Early Years, has lost my scent. Maybe my L’Oréal Revitalift eye cream is having a better result than I think. Maybe the dark bags I continue to see under my eyes are ghost imprints. After two decades of hanging out there, I can’t help but see the illusion of the pesky buggers.     

    

Aging is supposed to help us evolve, doing away with vanity, letting others take their moment in the limelight and paring our lives down to the things experience tells us are more important. As someone who has spent a lifetime beating myself up over my looks, letting go of all that misery would be a blessing. It’s a relief knowing that self-criticism is quieter, the swells passing more quickly. I step away from the mirror the second a negative notion surfaces, I don’t glance in windows to gauge my weight as often anymore…something I learned is very common for people with eating disorders. I can settle with a shrug as my self-assessment for the day, a teenager’s ennui (Yeah, whatever) without the youthful complexion. (Oily, Pimply…stop romanticizing it!) 

 

Still, I brace for the onslaught of wrinkles and age spots. I worry about my face being pulled down by prominent jowls. I wonder how I’ll be able to handle seeing my skin turn as thin as crepe paper, every bumbling bump commemorated in red blotches. Sure, vanity will fade to nothing, but I feel that, for myself, despair will move in. 

 

Could have bought that Porsche
if I hadn't invested so heavily
in false hope.

Like red Porsches, life’s lessons are wasted on older folks. Why couldn’t I have accepted my younger self? Why didn’t I embrace it, knowing that was as good as it would get? Why did I put so much hope into the radio commercial testimonials about Clearasil? Why didn’t I extend college another year or three? Why didn’t I fight back, blaring the Donna Summer cassettes in my Chevette every time someone had the audacity to say disco sucked?

 

I feel an inkling to fly to Tampa, rent a car and head two hours northeast. I’ve Googled the Fountain of Youth and I see no fountain at all. It’s just another schmucky attraction where people will happily my $17.79. 

 

But I won’t be a sucker. 

 

If I wait another year, I’ll get the senior’s discount, coughing up only $15.92, the savings getting me a sauerkraut-laden hotdog, once I peruse old pamphlets to find a time machine that’ll take me back to 1978. Ah, forget it. They didn’t have veggie dogs back then. Sauerkraut in a bun isn’t worth the effort.

 

And so it goes. Life. No brakes. No turning back. Maybe it’s another one of those indignities that comes with aging, but the future seems to be approaching at greater speed. I’m buckled in. Ready. Or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

CLICKING ON

My birthday happened. A friend emailed me the week before to make plans. A dinner. The message included, “Is this a big one?” I knew what he meant and, no, entry into a new decade is still a year away. “Don’t rush me,” I replied. Still, at my age, they’re all big ones in terms of numbers and they all seem to be rushing me. 

 

Another birthday? Already?! Pick any random smaller number—27, 35, 43, 52—they came and went so fast. How do I slow the speed setting on this treadmill of life?

 

Alas, the speed setting is locked. And so, yes, another birthday, another number on the age clicker. 

 

I’m not a birthday guy. It has nothing to do with bigger numbers. Sometime in my early twenties, I started letting Happy Birthday messages go straight to the answering machine, a gadget that sounds as ancient as the telegraph and messenger pigeons. I can’t cite a particular birthday, but I suspect I go into hiding on my “special day” because I was disappointed with how it was or wasn’t celebrated once or twice. Was it the pair of socks my grandparents gave me when I was eight, ignoring my wish list which included Lite-Brite and the gender inappropriate Easy-Bake Oven? Maybe it was the Hardy Boys book they gave me the next year and the year after. So boring. So many words. (I was a very slow reader.) 

 

I shouldn’t blame my grandparents. Their gifts never dazzled, but they did have a nice tradition of buying a little something for the other grandchildren when it was a different sibling’s birthday. Pez dispenser? Pet rock? I don’t remember. Maybe that’s what the socks were, a non-birthday consolation, and my sketchy memory has made argyles the main attraction. 

 

Someone that mattered probably missed a birthday. Probably a whole cluster of friends. My guess is it was part of leaving university as all my Forever Friends started new lives in Boston and Tulsa where new jobs and, yes, newer friends made the birthdays of friends from college easy to forget. We didn’t have Facebook sending us reminders. We didn’t have calendars on phones or laptops. We had to open up address books every January and write all the birthdays on wall calendars that celebrated “The Far Side” or Miami Vice or Vermont. Some of us prided ourselves in how many birthdays were committed to memory along with phone numbers, state capitals and all the actresses who played on TV’s Charlie’s Angels, in order of appearance and ranked (#TeamKateJackson).

 

The Swedish cinnamon bun,
aka kanelbulle.

Whatever the genesis for shunning my birthday, it’s now entrenched. I go into hiding which isn’t as bad as it sounds. Usually, it means I go on a solo hike—a treat in itself—or head out of town…in recent years to the Oregon Coast, Seattle, Victoria or Stockholm. (The Stockholm trip was three weeks and the birthday being smack in the middle of it was merely fortuitous. It meant an extra kanelbulle on another day of being gloriously ignored by Swedes.)

 

This year's birthday escape:
a glorious, seven-hour hike. 

I spent one birthday in a psych ward. It was a little too anti-birthday, even for me.

 

Aging has been on my mind more than usual the past couple of months and not because my local drugstore sent me a $5 voucher, saying, “We wanted to celebrate with you.” (A virtual celebration with a drugstore sounds sadder than argyle socks but, yes, I’ll take the free shaving cream. Begone, gray whiskers!) 

 

The truth is, I don’t feel older. I continue to contend my body and mind are aligned with thirtysomething. It sounds so much better than any other decade-something in part because I adored the TV show way back in the ’80s. (Good god, I just Googled the cast and they’re all sixtysomething and seventysomething. Duh…but still a shocker. It seems only Paul Rudd and characters in comics don’t age.)

 

These characters drink heavily
from the fountain of youth.

I get a reality check whenever I leave my condo and have quick, casual exchanges with people who don’t know me. I’m just the guy in front of them, waiting to order my oat milk latte or the person they’re trying to get past as I hunch over and eyeball Häagen-Dazs pints in the freezer aisle at the grocery store. Three words set me straight: “Excuse me, sir.” 

 

Okay the “excuse me” is fine. Nice manners. Better than a sigh, a grunt or a shove. But it’s the “sir” that feels like an assault. Did they say that as they maneuvered by the skateboard dude on aisle three? I may feel one age, but clearly I look another.

 

I mean, good for Colleen
Hoover, but what about
the rest of us?

For practical, non-vanity reasons, that’s a concern. I worry I’m aging out of my big career dream. I yearn to have another novel published. Actually, many novels. Move over, James Patterson and Colleen Hoover, I want a spot on the shelf, too. And off the shelf…grabbed by an avid reader, scanned at the register, taken home, read and loved…or at least liked enough to evade those crushing one-star reviews. (Who are these terrible people? Weren’t we all taught, If you don’t have anything nice to say…?)

 

I’ve been querying agents by email, my cover letter and first five pages ending up in virtual slushpiles and thereafter, it seems, passing through the virtual shredders. No response means no thanks. 

 

I shrug it off the unspoken dismissals. I remember all the men who rejected me. All the messages sent on dating sites, never answered. All the coffee dates that went nowhere, the few promising ones seeming so only from my perspective. I know rejection! I handle it well! 

 

But I don’t want to. I want an agent to finally say yes. Actually: “YES!!!” I generally think extra exclamation marks are redundant. Normally they cause involuntary tics. But bring ’em on, dream agent. Exclaim! Exclaim! Exclaim! Take all that love and enthusiasm to Random House and HarperCollins and land that book deal. Let me be your golden nest egg! 

 

Oh, how I dream. 

 

Let me continue to do so.

 

My best shot to getting an agent to consider my latest manuscript is to have their full attention, face to face, instead of being one of a sixty querying emails they power through on a Saturday afternoon before they get to do something more appropriately Saturday afternoon-y.     

Two weeks ago, I attended a writing conference in Seattle and pitched three different novels to three different agents. Each pitch was in one of those hollow hotel conference rooms with oversized beige drapes, beige tablecloths and a carpet adorned with rust-colored flowers and swirls intended to cover at least twelve years of wine and coffee stains. (No stains from me; I did, however, spill a quarter bag of flax pumpkin granola while waiting in an armchair in the lobby. Sorry!) 

 

My in-the-flesh face time with each agent amounted to four minutes each.

 

Bing!

 

A timer and some watchful volunteers made sure we’d vacate our chairs posthaste.

 

The first impression was everything. With eighty wannabe authors entering the pitching room at the same time—it was one of four such sessions—I needed to stand out for all the right reasons. For days, I sharpened my spiel. I timed myself, whittling things down from a rambling seven minutes to ninety seconds, the time recommended to allow an agent to ask follow-up questions, assuming they didn’t scowl, wave their arm and say, “No agent for you!” 

 

While I knew the content of the pitch mattered most, I knew other things factored into an agent requesting pages and ultimately wanting to take me on as a client. I brushed my teeth in the men’s room. I popped a mint. I adjusted the collar of my conservatively stylish shirt. And I poofed up my hair which I’d had cut and highlighted the day before. No gray. Even the sideburns got a paint job. 

 

Please, let no one smile vacantly and say, “Thank you, sir.”

 

Let me look young. Younger, at least. If not thirtysomething, then fortysomething. I needed agents to see a long, bright writing future in me instead of my name on waiting list for Shady Pines.

 

LET ME BE YOUR CASH COW!!! 

 

Things went well enough. Two out of three agents requested more. We clicked. This time, the word click feels like a good thing. Maybe it will lead to something. This old-ish guy has so much more to offer.

 

HAVE WE MET BEFORE?

At first blush, it sounds self-absorbed for me to say I’ve been reading a few of my old blog posts over the last twenty-four hours. Is that like spending a day gazing at all your selfies? (Okay, I had to do that too, but I limited it to twenty minutes. I’ve got an article that’s supposed to get published and they need a photo of me. Made me realize I don’t have anything other than selfies, in part because I’m too embarrassed to ask anyone to take my photo, but also because I do most things on my own. Not a sad thing. I enjoy Me Time.) I’m telling myself it’s okay to reread some of my blog writing. People can spend afternoons looking through old photos or reading past journal entries. Let laughs and horror abound. 

 

I waded through past posts for a reason. I’d received another “Someone Likes You” notification from online dating site Plenty of Fish and, when I looked at the profile, the pics seemed vaguely familiar. Do I know you? 

 

I recognized that he was one of those longtime fishermen on the site. (Hey, me too.) Sadly, this was confirmed as I clicked on each of the five photos he’d included. He’d gone through the trouble of giving each one a caption to provide some context. Good move, generally speaking. It shows more attention to creating a profile than most guys. Unfortunately, his photo captions included the date of each photo as well. 2009. 2009. 2010. 2011. 2009.

 

Okay, mister, what do you look like nowadays?

 

Many of us would like to believe that we are ageless. Surely there’s no difference between fifty-six-year-old me and forty-six-year-old me. Heck, maybe I even look younger. (My hair stylist, Melanie, can do wonders!) Even if I can’t see the signs of aging when I look in the mirror, I know others do. Compared to a decade ago, I get called “sir” so much more. If Queen Elizabeth had knighted me, I’d be okay with it but, that not being the case, it rattles me every time. Good god! What is it they’re seeing? (Note to self: Get Melanie to dye my graying sideburns.)

 

Later in the day, I logged into another site. It’s for hookups. I’d set up an account when I decided my 2020 New Year’s resolution was to loosen up sexually. As with most resolutions, there was a flashy start—I’m doing this!—then nothing. I’ll blame COVID. (Sometimes a pandemic comes in handy.) Whenever I see a message on this site, I panic. I can tell myself that a quickie would be good for me, but the only reason I’d want to drop to my knees immediately upon entering a stranger’s home is if I’d lost a contact. (Heck, that would be awkward enough.) The guy who liked me on POF sent me a message on the smutty site, too. 

 

Isn’t this a little stalker-ish? Keep it to one platform, please.

 

The message was lengthy, squirmy Either/Or blend: Let’s date…or let’s just meet and do these (very) specific sexual things. What a mess.

 

The message also confirmed that I did know him. We’d gone on a coffee date at some point more than six years ago based on information he recalled which was, in fact, a lot: where we’d had coffee, things I was writing, other parts of our conversation.

 

If it was ringing any bells, the sound was faint. I now had a foggy image of us having coffee on Granville Island. I have some sense that he was okay. He liked me, but I felt relief that he lived in Victoria which meant he wouldn’t be in Vancouver all that often. He would have had to be much more than “okay” for each of us to be coordinating ferry rides to the city. 

 

Still, I was curious to get a clearer account of that previous date so I blog-checked him. I’ve written about so many dates. I did a quick search of “Granville Island,” another on “Victoria.” Posts came up but nothing about him. 

 

He wasn’t blog-worthy. 

 

That confirms he was indeed okay. Not a horrendous coffee date which is always oh so bloggable and not a hopeful coffee date that I might blog…unless I didn’t want to jinx things. If it were that great, a blog tour would have been unnecessary. I would have remembered, even with the fuzzy brain of a guy who is frequently called sir.

THE YEAR OF "NO"

I’m no reptile. I don’t have skin any thicker than the average human. Rejection still stings.

And in 2019, I have to be ready for more rejection than ever. I face it on two fronts.

One is as a writer. I have at least four novel-length manuscripts ready to submit to agents and editors this year. For now, I’ve established a plan for sending out a young adult novel and a commercial fiction novel. I spend time each week researching agents and ranking them as to how closely I can speculate that their interests might match my work. (If only I wrote feminist fantasy with LGBT characters.) I send out a cover letter with the first chapters of my manuscript (always following specific submission guidelines) and wait for a response or, more likely, the response period to lapse.

No news is bad news. Form rejections are a rarity these days; instead, silence means an agent has passed on the work. The hard part is not knowing when exactly that decision was made. The sound of crickets can be disheartening, but I’m always ready, going down my list, sending out my work again and again. Yes, rejection is part of the writing process. It’s always going to be disappointing, but I tell myself I’m getting used to it.

On those rare occasions when I get a form rejection, I try to convince myself that a physical shrug is all it’s worth before moving on. Rarer still is a personalized rejection. While there’s some good that I can read into it—there are always some kind words and specific praise for the work—this type is harder to shake off. It means I was closer to acceptance...and yet still, to quote Carole King, so far away. How do you bandage a bruised ego?

I’m aggressively going to writing rejections this year after reading “I Got Rejected 101 Times” in the New York Times last month. It reminds me of a writing quote I once read: “Don’t be kind of bold. Be bold.” I shall submit. Again and again. I shall try to trick myself into thinking a shrug is all that’s needed to move on. And I shall continue writing, even when the roar of silence and the form rejections seem to indicate that this journey is a foolish dream.

The second area for rejection comes with still being single...and still looking. It can come in person, like when I order a coffee and try to glance at a nice looking man in line. If he looks my way, he invariably looks right through me. I’m so pale apparently I have become a ghost. On occasion, I may notice a guy at the gym. But he’s got his ear buds in and is staring down at his phone. He never notices me. It’s nothing personal. He just doesn’t ever look up. And, really, how am I supposed to compete with another YouTube cat video or that one with the moose in someone’s backyard? Phones have made actual eye contact between strangers only slightly less likely than a lightning strike.

So I’m stuck with online dating sites. Slim pickings after ten years. Same profiles, complete with stale profile pics showing off how aging gay men used to look. (I mention this regularly in blog posts, hoping someone will read it and actually update his images. How novel for a fifty-year-old man—who is truly that age—to have photos of his fifty-year-old self rather than a collage of his hairstyles through the ages.)

A few years ago, I’d read that the early January is when the largest wave of new profiles arrives each year. People set resolutions about putting themselves out there for dating possibilities. New hope comes with the dawning of the New Year. I’m not sure that I have any of that new hope; rather, I’m an opportunist. Let someone else’s hope make them more open to receiving a message from me.

With that mindset, I sent out a message on each of the two dating sites for which I have accounts. I may follow the same routine as my publishing journey. Send something out there, wait a reasonable period of time for the message to lapse and then send another...at least for as long as I can find possibly worthy profiles. It might take me into February at least.

I’ve broadened my search net to a hundred miles beyond Vancouver since the Vancouver pool appears pretty dry, even with the New Year. For this reason, I sent a message to an artist living on Whidbey Island in Washington. Nice looking, creative, a very positive profile. The reply came last night:

“I would absolutely love to get to know you. In all transparency, I feel like there is more likely to be a friendship then a romantic relationship. So I would feel comfortable if we moved forward with that.”

Ouch. To be clear, it’s a dating site, not a “let’s be friends” site. If Jeff lived in Vancouver, I’d be happy to grab a coffee, chat and, yes, perhaps we’d connect enough to become hiking pals or brunch buds. But the hour and a half drive to see potential-chum Jeff feels a bit much. It’s not like I ever just happen to be in the Whidbey Island area. In fact, I’ve only been there once, in the northern end. (He lives on the southern tip.)

I thanked Jeff for his honesty and indicated that, yes, perhaps we could meet and have a nice chat. I pressed the send button and then tried my best to shrug off the slamming shut of the romance door.

I can’t say I was at all successful. It’s hard when “potential” is so clearly shut down. And I woke up today feeling down, thinking sending ANY messages out on a dating site is futile. I wallowed in the likely fact I didn’t come off as even remotely attractive in my carefully selected profile photos. Winning personality, just not a looker. Yep, the shrugging didn’t work so well.

Not attractive enough.

That insecure Ugly Duckling feeling that first formed when I was ten and became firmly entrenched in my teens and twenties moves in whenever it gets the chance. I may not have a reptile’s thick skin but somehow I’m about as physically appealing as an iguana. Maybe that’s why I liked the movie “The Shape of Water” so much.

It’s hard to be in my mid-fifties and still have to face this kind of rejection. If I were solidly in a relationship, maybe I could live with my flaws. If he accepts them, maybe I can, too. Maybe I could fully welcome my aging self and the corresponding attitude of not giving a fuck. Black socks with sandals, untamed eyebrows, belly serving as a place to rest my beer can.

But I’m still out there. Still subject to that “yea” or “nay” judgment, the results feeling overwhelmingly “nay”. Vulnerability sucks.

Ready or not, 2019 will be the Year of No. I trudge on, seeking my own holy grail, the elusive “yes”. One for writing, one for dating is all it takes to be a real game-changer.

GAY MATH

Everybody does it.

That’s what people say when they have their first beer at 15 or 16. (Or 12?!) They say it when they scratch up someone’s fender, backing out of a parking space, not leaving a note. They say it when they go ten miles per hour above the speed limit. (Okay, fifteen.) They say it when they fudge their taxes.

It’s always seemed like faulty rationalizing rather than any expression of logic. Admittedly, I’ve relied on it to justify my heavy foot on the gas pedal. I’m getting better, but that may be part of getting older.

Ah, getting older. Happens to everyone. Except online. Can’t tell you how many 55-year-old bodies I’ve seen on “41-year-olds” and how many “53-year-olds” look 68. It’s gay math. Certain, ahem, numbers get inflated. Others get significantly reduced.

I feel so square. I’m 53. I say I’m 53. I work out hard, I watch what I eat (to extremes). I could easily lie. Say I’m 47, 48, maybe go even a little lower. Everyone does it, right?

Pass.

It’s a turnoff to me. It’s a trust issue. If the first thing you say about yourself is untrue—something so basic—how am I supposed to believe other things? Yep, I shut down over first coffee whenever a guy readjusts his age. If age is just a number, why not be real? I’ve been dismissed because of that real number. I know that. But that’s the other guy’s issue not mine. I can keep my integrity intact.

I’ll close out this post with a humorous section from John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies (Penguin Random House, 2017). (Highly recommended!) This passage is taken from a first date in a pub in Dublin, 1994, back in the days of personal ads instead of online dating/hooking up. Seems “Everyone does it” has quite a history.

                He frowned a little and took a long drink from his beer. “You’re

                in your fifties?” he asked. “I thought you were younger than

                that.”

                I stared at him, wondering whether he was a little hard of

                hearing. “No,” I said. “I’m forty-nine. I just said.”

                “Yes, but you don’t meant that you’re really forty-nine, do you?”

                “What else would I mean?”

                “Jesus, you’ve been off the dating scene quite a while, haven’t

                you? The thing is, most men looking for other men claim to be

                younger than they really are. Especially older men. If you meet

                a man from a personal ad and he says he’s in his late thirties,

                that means he’s pushing fifty and thinks he can get away with

                thirty-nine. Delusional, most of them, but you know. Whatever.

                When you said you’re forty-nine, I assumed that meant you were

                mid to late fifties in real life.”

                … “Do you meet a lot of people from personal ads?” I asked…

                “From time to time,” he said. “I met a lad a couple of weeks ago, he

                said he was nineteen but when he showed up he was almost my own

                age. He was wearing a Blondie T-shirt, for Christ’s sake.”

                “I used to have one of those,” I said. “But why would you want to meet

                someone who you thought was nineteen anyway?”

                “Why wouldn’t I?” he said, laughing. “I’m not too old for a nineteen-

                year-old.”

                “Well, I suppose that’s a matter of opinion. But what would you have in

                common with a boy that age?”

                “We don’t need to have anything in common. It wasn’t his conver-

                 sational skills that I was after.”

                … “So how old are you?” I asked finally.

                “Thirty-four.”

                “So does that mean you’re really thirty-four?”

                “It does. But I’m twenty-eight when I meet people.”

                “You’re meeting me right now.”

                “Yes, but that’s different. You’re older. So I can be my own age.”

                “Right. And have you had many relationships?”

                “Relationships? No,” he said, with a shrug.

Sigh. Thanks, John Boyne, for writing something so relatable. It’s always funnier when it’s fiction!