I, Solation

    The bar at the hotel has a few regulars who happen to be gay.  One of them, who also happens to be a reporter for a local TV station,  came in with a large group of his friends the other night.  I think they were celebrating a birthday.  Most of them were young, most were good looking, and it was obvious they all liked each other. For a while, during the slow process of leaving and saying goodnight, they stood on the front sidewalk where I was working, and I got to observe them as they engaged in affectionate banter the way real friends do, and the hugs and kisses as they left for the night.
    A couple of mornings later, one of my co-workers facetiously asked me if I enjoyed seeing all those young gay guys together in a group.  (Teasing comments are part of our normal conversation.)  He didn't know that I had actually been thinking about that group of guys a lot.  I said, "No, actually it just made me sad."  Of course I had to explain what I meant.
    Fact is, I miss having a crowd.
    I'm nearly 50 years old.  I'm nocturnal.  I'm poor.  The friends we do have either don't know each other or don't like each other, and some of them live in the land of Far Far Away.  (We live in Edmond, which, in OKC's gay scene, is like living at the North Pole.)  And everybody is busy busy busy.  So getting together with, say, half a dozen other people is difficult at best.
    I have friends at work, but even getting together with them is difficult.  We went to a party recently that was being thrown by a co-worker.  Gaby and I were first to arrive and first to leave because I had to work that night.  Most of the rest of the guests arrived after we left, including those I wanted to see most.
   Our normal Monday night routine has been to go out to The Park, but we haven't been going out much lately, mostly just because of scheduling problems  (I've been working a lot of Mondays lately, dammit).  Plus, Gaby's  been a unwilling to go even when we can, and I'm not often willing to go without him.  Most of the people we know at the clubs are people we used to see at The Park on Monday nights.  But Mondays have changed since the "show" moved from The Park across the street to The Phoenix, and when we do go out, the people we know aren't there because they just haven't made the switch.  I did make one new friend at the Phoenix -- through a co-worker, no less -- but that friendship hasn't been cultivated because we haven't been there to do it.
    I read somewhere online recently that the gay clubs, at least from the social aspect, are a lot like church.  I can definitely see that, but Gaby and I are attenders who have not gotten involved with any ministries, so our  social connections are tenuous at best.  But the weather's getting warmer now, and both The Park and the Phoenix have a patio out back, away from the thumpa-thumpa, and it's so much easier to get into a good conversation with someone when you can actually hear each other.  Conversation is my favorite thing; the challenge is finding someone interested.
    Right now I'm busy with art shows, so I have little time myself to socialize.  But what I really want to do is to find a couple of our friends who are willing and able to go with us out of town for a couple of days.  But who?  And I'm not sure Gaby's on board with this because the first time I brought it up to him, he gave me a bunch of reasons why it was unlikely to happen instead of helping me figure out how it could happen.  But I have vacation time I need to use, and this is how I want to use it.  I just got to figure out how.