I am never going out alone again.

When I go out, it is always on a day my husband has the girls, and it is always with my best friend, and it is always (when it's alcoholic) to a gay bar.

Decided to go out yesterday afternoon. Without my best friend. But at the same bar we always go to. Cheap drinks, and it's filled with homosexual men. The kind who'll tell me I'm beautiful without trying to get in my pants. It's why I go there. I'm technically still married (for how long I'm not clear), and at any rate am still really burned from Rob, who screwed me over thoroughly and yet honestly is one of the good guys in every thing but me. And even if I was on the market, I wouldn't be going to a bar to meet guys.

So there I am, chatting with a drunken fellow who told me I reminded him of his mother; I was apparently a picture of the '70s with my dress & hair the way they were. I had a great conversation with his ex-boyfriend as well, who I'd met before when we together bemoaned that our respective candidate is John McCain. All was well & good, even after both men left (at different times). I was sitting there enjoying my drink and the air conditioning and feeling pretty.

And then the one straight guy in the bar found me.

Drunk off his ass and quite literally old enough to be my daddy, he plopped down on the stool beside me and started, er, flirting. Or something. In between slurring appraisals of my sexiness (good to know I've still got my drunk old man fan club), he confided that he used to be "a drug kingpin" in the gay community. Before he went to prison. But that was also because he shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. (OK, not really, but I swear that song was running through my head.)

Ignoring him didn't work. Turning my back to him didn't work.

Getting up and moving to a seat on a different side of the bar to talk with a couple of gay men about their plans to buy into the King William area did work, thank God.

It was a sort of funny/scary thing, and only went to prove what I'd been told earlier in the evening: "Oh, there are plenty of straight men here, but us queens will defend you." Thank God for gay men. And the fact that my ride showed up early.

(Yes, I know, I should've sicced the bartender on him. I'm not used to this stuff.)

Sigh.

I then went home and cut things into small pieces for a few hours on Dungeon Siege. I think I shall get back into the coffee bar circuit, and that halter dress I felt so pretty in is going to go back into the closet for a while.

(For the record, I'm not really bugged about it. I was laughing over it with my mother yesterday. But seriously, alone at a bar or not, I am still wearing my wedding rings. Maybe that's a clue.)