BYOB? NFW!

Parking cars on the lawn isn't the tackiest thing I've ever seen.

I was one of 78 people who got an e-vite this week for a "Spring Kickoff Martini Party." This is from someone I barely know. In the opening line of the e-vite, he states that he's got a martini shaker that is "just itching to be used" and I had a sneaking suspicion that he actually intended that tag line for the e-vite to his big gay orgy.

Invitees were also informed that this party is strictly BYOB and due to a large number of invites, people are advised to provide their own glassware.

Let me get this gay: He's inviting me to a martini party but I have to bring my own liquor AND my own martini glass. How tacky is that?

Fortunately, not one of the 78 invitees has agreed to attend. It always makes me happy to know that you can't always pull the wool over everyone's eyes the same way that Big Momma and Juwanna Mann try to do in those films.

Sushi Survivor

I remember watching talk shows like Sally Jessy Raphael and making fun of the deluded women who pined over the men who abused them. It would always be a man who emotionally abused a woman by talking down to her, taking her money, and making her wait for him while he was doing god knows what. The abused woman would also comment about not being satisfied by the man, which would always surprise me because most of the men who do the emotional abusing would be very attractive. After repeated abuse, the woman would always go back to the man because he'd offer her something that she couldn't refuse like empty promises or something shiny. Audience members would goad the abused woman, asking her why she kept going back to the man and she'd reply: BECAUSE I LOVE HIM. It would be years before I truly understood what the abused woman was going through.

I went to eat at a sushi restaurant called Tank this past weekend. I'd been there many times before and it's not always my first choice, but I hadn't been there in a while so I thought I'd give it another chance. No matter who is at the helm of Tank's host podium, you can always count on being treated like you're a street urchin who'd just wandered into Cartier. They never greet you, but just coldly ask: "How many?" as they roll their eyes and usher you to the back of the room where they throw the menus on the table and walk away like they just lost thirty seconds of their life that they totally could have used to file their nails or treat someone else like shit.

If you're wearing a rabbit's foot and a four leaf clover, you'll be lucky enough to get seated in less than 45 minutes (even though there are always empty tables). Be sure to take a picture of your waiter because you'll be going so long without seeing him or her that you'd need it to remember who exactly you have to kill to get a refill on your $3.00 soft drink.

We couldn't read the menus because it's so poorly lit inside Tank. It was like being in an actual tank. I almost had a heart attack when I saw how they'd raised their prices. The soft shell crab roll is $14.00 at Tank and it doesn't even give you the power to become invisible like it should for that amount of money.

The music is so loud in there that people have to yell at each other in order to be heard. It gets so loud that you sometimes think that you're in a noisy cafeteria, but with better wall decor. It doesn't help that all of the tables are so close together that you end up backhanding someone when you gesture during the climax of a funny story involving fantastic sex and parachute cord.

We waited for 58 minutes before our food arrived and we scarfed it all down in nine minutes. Afterward, we were still hungry. We'd wasted almost two hours, we were treated poorly, and we weren't satisfied. I remembered that this is why I hate going there and that I'd said this so many times before, yet I still come back. Suddenly I realized that I was that abused woman on Sally Jessy Raphael.

Whenever I tell people about my terrible experiences at Tank, they ask me why I keep going back. I tell them that I love the sushi.

The rude host, the ungodly amount of time we spent waiting for something that ultimately didn't satisfy us, the fact that the prices were prime examples of highway robbery, and my inexplicable love for the accursed ambrosia after all of the harrowing experiences are all consistent with the talk shows like Sally Jessy where audience members tell the abused ones to "kick him to the curb!"

I'm sure that Tank is aware of this and that's why they've got that one thing that keeps people coming back for more. There's that one thing that is just so attractive that it makes people forget all of the emotional distress and allows them to justify any future turmoil. With the abusive men, it's the promise to buy the abused woman a romantic trip to Branson, Missouri. With Tank, it's half price sushi on Saturdays and Sundays. We need to wake up and smell the mental anguish!

There are a lot of wonderful men out there who are better than the slime balls you used to see on Sally Jessy and you have to understand that the same is true for sushi restaurants. In the long run, you'll be a much happier and better-adjusted person if you just close your eyes and make the leap.

In the rare moment of lucidity after leaving Tank that day, I gave my friends permission to shoot me if I ever mentioned the desire to go to Tank again.

Importance

It's been difficult to write blog entries that are new and exciting, so I decided to use one of those online topic generators to help things along. The first prompt that came up read "list things that are very important to you." This was indeed a stroke of fortune because I think that listing things that are important to me will help people understand the uniqueness of this blog. To keep things simple, I'll just make a numbered list and discuss each item.

• It's important to stay informed about current events. The three most important letters in the world are "C N N." Nobody cares about what goes on in Port Charles because the world is waiting to see what witty things are going to come out of Anderson Cooper's mouth. I watch so much CNN that the logo is burned into the bottom left hand corner of my television screen.

• Too much technology is a bad thing. Our ancestors didn't have Tivo and they were able to survive. How much more fun can you have reading The Da Vinci Code for the fifteenth time instead of mindlessly tapping away at a Nintendo DS? LOTS!

• Never have a one night stand with someone you picked up at a bar. Bar chastity is one of the few unspoiled treasures that gay men have. If you start spreading your legs for any hot man who buys you shots of Jim Bean, then the whole community will start whispering behind your back like you were in elementary school: "Raunchy Richie whose crotch is itchy. He's such a whore and he's always bitchy!" Take my advice and don't go out to bars thinking that sex is the only thing that matters.

• I love having sex with women. Every time I have sex with my boyfriend, I imagine that I'm a Dutch soccer player and that he's a girl with a strap on. I love the softness of a woman and the way her body trembles when I take her to that moment of ecstasy as our bodies undulate in an explosion of sexual energy.

• I especially love April Fools Day. And if you haven't already figured out that this post is a joke, then you don't know me as well as you think you do!